Christmas

This year, things were a little strange with Christmas. We generally have some additional family around for the holidays, but due to a strange turn of events, it was just the three of us.

At first, I think both Day and I felt a little left out and bummed about being on our own on the holidays, but in the end, we decided to make the best of it. We chose our own traditions, and decided how we would handle stockings, gifts, meals, etc.

Day's family never really celebrated Christmas, so he didn't have any specific traditions, but for him, celebrations often center around food. For me, my family celebrated by having a Christmas Eve get together for the extended family, and then basically did Christmas day on our own, with a special dinner, generally steak and all of the trimmings, or prime rib.

Our new traditions, which I think we will stick with, were to get up when Ethan did and check out our stockings.

Ethan actually chose most of the trinkets in his, including an elephant Pez dispenser, a light up shark, a light up bouncy ball, a hot wheels car, and some crayons.

Day really enjoys trying specialty beers, so I wrapped a few for under the tree and a few for in his stocking. He is especially fond of the hard to find, and Belgian beers, and I found Samichlaus, Watou Tripel, Trappiste Rochefort 8, and a few others.

I also chose my own stocking gifts, which included some cute earrings from World Market, and some yarn that I picked up at Tuesday Morning.

Following our stockings, I went and cooked a big breakfast with scrambled eggs, thick cut bacon, and French toast, with Grand Marnier Cream Cheese, and/or Pomegranate syrup. Everything turned out so yummy, and I did a bunch of the prep work early, so it wasn't too big of a deal to have a real breakfast.

After breakfast, we opened our gifts. Since Ethan had a Christmas celebration with Nana earlier in December, he understood what to do with the presents under the tree, and somehow he managed to open all of the toys first, followed by his new clothes, then mom and dad's gifts. I'm not quite sure how he knew, perhaps the size and shape of boxes, but he chose each present from under the tree, and definitely chose toys over clothes, and then his over ours.

Since Ethan had to play with each gift before moving on to the next one, gift opening took nearly 2 hours, which was nice, considering that we were snowed in anyway.

Our next new tradition was to have one of Day's favorites for dinner. It was idli, sambar and vada, which is a typical breakfast in southern India. It is one of his favorite meals, and I had never been able to accomplish making the vada before, but I was able to make them on Christmas. Even Ethan liked them.

I'm sure that we'll add more traditions as Ethan grows up, but this was a great start, and we had a wonderful time together as a family.