Christmas Craziness in the Neighbour hood... what fun! :D

Christmas craziness starts long before Christmas day around here. Nearly a month is spent in preparation... Especially for those of us who make most of the gifts we give. Besides those of us who are procrastinators and take forever to decide what to make or buy for people :P The majority of the craziness this year took place on Christmas Eve. Me, Mom, and Aunt Sharon (aka the Neighbourhood womenfolk :P ) kicked the menfolk out of the house for the day so that we could wreak havoc (or work miracles) in the kitchen, unhindered by grubby little hands trying to sample everything. ^_^ It was nice to have a little bit of girl time for a change, and I always enjoy makin schtuff in the kitchen.
The day before, mom and I had started a couple of the treats that took extra long to make due to having to chill out before being dipped in chocolate. Well one of those was these little cheescake deallies that you're supposed to dip in semisweet baking chocolate mixed with butter. Well we didn't have the baking chocolate so we used chocolate chips. Unfortunately mom and I BOTH forgot something we had once before learned... if you put butter in chocolate chips and melt them, the butter makes the chips stiffen up eventually. So our cheescake dipping flopped for the time being... Besides the fact that dipping crumbly crust in chocolate kinda doesn't work anyway :-/ sooo, being disheartened (BTW this is the 24th again) by that, we decided to skip it for the moment and move on to the cookie dough truffles (yes they are as amazing as they sound :P thus we have to make them every year)... Now I distinctly remember that in the past we used plain chocolate chips to dip the cookie dough truffles in... so we skipped the butter this time :P Well I got stuck with the task of dipping and prettifying the truffles. I guess I was good enough at it mom and AS decided to leave it all to me :P Meanwhile they set to work making pies and fudge and stuff (fortunately, for fudge you can use chocolate chips melted with butter :P )... After much success with the cookie dough truffles I set about to tackle the chocolate-coating of the cheesecake bites... all 90 somethin of them :-/ (I oopsidently made them a wee bit small :P) Lemme tell ya my back was killin me by the time I was done O_O I had to devise a method of chocolatizing them without losing the crumbly crust and without making too much of a mess.... I feel so accomplished. But I was so exhausted when I was done that I couldn't do anymore :P So I went to walmart with AS to pick up a couple things we forgot for one of the salads then went over to the school building to do something and ended up chatting with Teresa for a while :P fortunately everything was pretty much done so I wasn't missed too badly :halo: and we had fun... didn't we Teresa? :D
So anyway after that was all done we piled up some of the goodies we had made, grabbed some guitars and a Christmas movie and headed to UJ's house for a little Christmas Eve party :) AS had already planned for the guys to have dinner over there, so we joined them (saved us a bit of work ;) ) for dinner, then we all proceeded to eat too much chocolate and sing every Christmas carol we could manage to think of. We were gonna watch the Christmas movie we'd brought too, but it was getting late ish and we still had stuff to do at home! So back we went and set about wrapping last-minute presents. Of course, I had already finished mine... But I'm so obsessed with wrapping boxes that I managed to acquire the task of wrapping presents for Brian and Nathan. (Brian's I had wrapped earlier in the day, Nathan's I wrapped in the evening ^_^ ). Call me silly but I thought it was the perfect way to end the day :P Even though I hurt from being in such an odd position for an hour or so wrapping presents :P
Ok so enough about Christmas Eve :P Christmas day dawned as any other day. A pretty pink sky peeking through my window with plenty of noisy birds to remind me to wake up. I looked outside and saw that it had frosted overnight. I chuckled to myself... white Christmas indeed... Knowing the day would reach somewhere in the 60s. Humbug... I want snow. Whatev :P It was a while before everyone else roused (it HAD been a late night...) and finally around 9 o'clock the uncle and aunt arrived bearing gifts from afar (aka the other side of Ava). We started out with a family picture, then a reading of the Christmas story, followed by an insane frenzy of present-opening, then finally breakfast. Incidentally, it's a bad idea to have breakfast last. You see, the way we usually do presents is that someone will start by handing someone a present, then that person picks out a present for someone else, and so on... Well the problem we ran into is that people would open their present, ooh and ahhh, then proceed to unpackage their present and begin exploring or playing with it. Meanwhile everyone else is sitting there glaring at them and groaning and finally someone says GET SOMEONE ELSE A PRESENT NOW. Not good for the Christmas spirit :P Thus the present-opening was taking too long. So everyone was getting hungry and the food was smelling awfully good. So in the impatience of it all the last 25 or 50 % of the presents were opened in a somewhat disorganized manner and I missed half of what everyone got :P oh well... life goes on. Anyway we spent the remainder of the day tinkering with our new toys, stuffing ourselves at the table, and watching a DVD Brian got for the family and watching "It's a Wonderful Life" ^_^ And that's pretty much how the day went :P
So anyway I only ended up making a couple presents this year and the rest I either bought or regifted :P sad, I know... but I'm bankrupt and I lacked inspiration since I've exhausted the use of wood and horseshoes and a lot of times ppl are just plain bored with what I give them :roll: But I did manage to do some woodburning which was slightly different and most definitely cool... except I need some better tips for my wood burner :-/ darn that stupid thing LOL :D
Ok for those of you who care, here's what I got for Christmas: Aaron got me a cool little guitar pick that hopefully I won't lose so easily :P Brian got me a cool Chris Rice CD... Nathan got me a Jeremy Camp CD... UJ and AS got me some pens to add to my collection and a little horsehead keyrack deally thing whatever it's called... Grandma (or Aunt Dawn rather :P ) sent me a horse calendar... Mom and Dad got me a beeeaaauuutiful new ESV Bible (YAYNESS! just what I asked for :D :D )... and Isaac got me a Fujifilm Finepix S1000 digital camera O_O I feel so spoiled... **Sigh** yeah so this Christmas was at least as good as last year :D Certainly as surprising... God is good. What else can I say? :D
now... for your enjoyment (or torture... :P ) here are some pictures from the day. They are not in order by any means... some I took with my new camera, some are off mom's camera :)

Philip showing mom something on HSA :P

Philip playing his new compact electric drum kit. He played that thang ALL day till mom half screamed at him :P hee hee

I took Isaac's mug shot with his fancy new HSA window sticker :P unfortunately his windows are tintned too dark :-/ grrr

Uncle John opening whatever Aaron gave him... I missed what it was :P

Isaac, designated cameraman...

Aaron listening to the Bible being read while clutching his precious stocking and whoppers :P

Nathan... guarding the presents :P

Dad reading the Bible with Brian looking on

Aunt Sharon and Colton... I have no idea what they were doing :P

Philip eating candy while listening to the Bible :P

Me listening to the Bible

My awesome camera

My awesome Bible!!!!

In case you have a hankerin to see any more pics, you can check them out here. and that concludes this lenghty blog. If you made it through, congrats... you deserve a cookie :P Until next time,
~Linnae