Christmas!!!

Okay, so I didn't write about the holidays at all in the midst of my dental issues.

Christmas we spent with my family, except for my very pregnant sister and her husband who can't travel right now. I hope they had a wonderful holiday!!
We went to STM's family party as it was on the day of mom's family's party and we'd spen the actual holiday with my family.

All in all they were both really lovely and everyone seemed truly happy to see one another and spend some time together - which is the real spirit of the holiday as far as I'm concerned, so all is good :)

My sister gave me a lovely assortment of teas, which I now have at my desk at work. It's kind of like having a mini tea shop - whenever I need tea (which is often...) I get to browse. My other sister, who has apparently decided to enable my burgeoning fiber habit, found more of this one amazing type of the softest merino roving you've probably ever felt - she got me enough to possibly make enough yarn for a sweater. Which is a lot of yarn. My third sister gave us Quelf, that oh so amusing board game we were considering purchasing - very nice :) It will get broken in when we go to Maine to go skiing with my good friend later this month. My parents gave me a gorgeous box in which to keep mementos from our wedding this past summer, and some really pretty tree ornaments. We got ornaments from several folks, in fact. I LOVE the ornaments, they make the tree look so much more 'family' and less 'hotel-lobby' lol.

Speaking of trees...I heard that my sister, the one who is expecting, had some trouble finding a tree. I hope they have better luck next year! We also waited until the weekend before Christmas to get our tree, but luckily the weather has been quite mild in the DC area, and though it rained heavily that day we were able to find an open tree farm. Since it wasn't too far away and we needed to stop by to pick up some gifts anyway we went to Lost Creek first. Rose, the events and tasting bar manager, fed us wine (whenever we go up there she always gives us wine), let us stay until the rain ebbed a bit, and then we went over to the tree farm. We almost got lost in the Loudon county back roads, but the drive is so pretty that we weren't worried about that :) We made it to the tree farm with time to spare and were directed first to the pre-cut trees. Seeing no reason to cut one if we could find a nice pre-cut tree, STM and I searched through, and sure enough we found a little 4' tree in the precut section that suited us just fine! Best part - it was a whole $10. They claimed it had probably been cut a week or more earlier, but we've had it for almost three weeks now and it's not even dropping needles. I'm very impressed. When I get home I will try to remember to post some pics of it!