Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily

Well, this is awkward.

HappyThanksgivingMerryChristmasHappyNewYear?!

It's always hard to return from an unintentional blogging break that got, well, really long, but it had to be done. I wasn't ready to throw in the blogging towel altogether so a comeback, however awkward or overwhelming, had to be made. Josh said I should just catch up as best I could and then move on from there. So...here's the catch up! I should warn you, however, that should you choose to continue, you are in for one huge picture dump.

I'll begin with Thanksgiving for which I made this cranberry jelly mold using a glass mold I got at a flea market in Belgium...

..and this pretty ricotta cheesecake with raspberry rhubarb sauce.

We had not one, but two delicious Thanksgiving dinners that were everything Thanksgiving dinners should be and even food aside, it was a Thanksgiving with all the trimmings!

...and football:

The weekend after Thanksgiving, the Andersons were here to help us decorate and officially kick off the Christmas season.Then it began. We went to the Christmas parade, we made Christmas crafts, we read Christmas books, we sent Christmas cards and we went to Christmas parties with friends.

We also spent two lovely weekends in Jefferson...

(Frazier took the picture of me and my grandparents above while we were in Jefferson one weekend...I just liked it so I'm sharing.)

...decorating the house for the Belgians' Christmas homecoming!
And then they arrived and the Christmas festivities really began!

We rode the Christmas train in Jefferson and went to Marshall to see the lights and have dinner.And we did even more Christmas-y things here. While drinking wassail.

When Christmas finally arrived it seemed like for a string of exhausting, exhilarating days we were forever opening presents...

...and taking pictures... (I refer you to this post on my mom's blog which has lots more pictures of our Christmas in case you weren't overloaded enough here.)

...and eating lots of good food......and just enjoying people. Really, really, really enjoying people. We just have the best of people to enjoy.Then it was all over.

I think we spent the week between Christmas and New Year's in a post-holiday stupor in which we refused to accept it was over.

We undecorated the Jefferson house since our company was back in Europe, but I left our tree up yet another week until I was so tired of it that putting it away was a relief. Josh and his parents went to Dallas the day after New Year's for the TicketCity bowl and that was the last of the holiday hurrahs. Very slowly we shook off the holidays and settled back into our old routines in a new year. After so much planning and looking forward to Christmas, the days that came afterwards (for which I had neither planned, nor anticipated) seemed so terribly...ordinary.

But then I remembered that even our ordinary days are pretty excellent...and now that we're all caught up here, I can go back to sharing them!

as ever,

Randi