Merry Christmas, one more time, my friends!  I hope that all of my friends who celebrated had a fabulous Christmas (and that those who didn’t got to enjoy a lovely winter weekend and maybe a day or two off work?).  We had a lovely Christmas week, most of which we spent at my parents’ house.  I was looking forward to a nice long break from thinking about work and was really hoping to turn my brain off completely.  That didn’t happen, but I still got a bit of a break and plenty of fun celebrating.  Get ready for a long recap!

We started our Christmas festivities early with an afternoon trip over the border to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario on the Saturday before Christmas.

Niagara-on-the-Lake is such a beautiful town.  If you’ve been reading for awhile, you may remember that we spent a weekend there in October of 2013 – but we haven’t been back since, which seems crazy since it’s so close.  Without border traffic (which we were lucky enough to miss this time) it’s only a little more than an hour from our house – close enough for a day trip, or even an afternoon and dinner.  We figured the town would look beautiful all decorated for Christmas, so we decided to make an afternoon excursion there.

As expected, the town looked lovely.  In quintessentially Canadian fashion, it wasn’t overdone at all – just perfectly festive and beautiful.  Niagara-on-the-Lake sits right in the middle of the Niagara wine region, which is making some excellent wines.  The last time we were here, we did some tasting.  That was out of the question for me this time, but I still found plenty to do, including finishing up my Christmas shopping and sipping a cup of the best hot cocoa I’ve ever had.

There was a Santa Claus greeting customers outside a toy store.  We tried to entice Peanut to get her picture taken with him, but she was having none of it.  He was a good Santa, too – he didn’t get in her face at all, but gave her a jolly wave from ten feet or so away, and when Peanut plastered herself to my leg he didn’t press the issue.  Maybe next year…

She was, however, delighted to spend a good fifteen minutes standing in this shrub.  Hey, whatever gets ya in the holiday spirit, kid.

  

After we communed with the shrub we wandered over to the town park, which has a cool playground.  Peanut enjoyed the swings just as much as she did back in 2013.  And then she did something she couldn’t have done in 2013 – went down the slide!  Such a big girl.

After we got ourselves nice and chilled on the playground, we warmed up with one more walk through town, and a stop for wood-fired pizza on the way home.  (It was good, but still couldn’t compare to Pizzeria Paradiso in Old Town Alexandria… so far, nothing we’ve found here does.)  After seeing how seamless and easy it was to spend just a few hours in Niagara-on-the-Lake, especially without hitting traffic at the border either going or coming, I think we’re going to try to do this again very soon.

The next day, on Sunday, we hosted Zan and Paul for an evening of Christmas treat baking (for the ladies) and football watching (for the men).  The guys had a good time watching the game and snacking on the delicious turkey pumpkin chili that Zan brought over in her CrockPot, and Zan and I had a fairly productive time in the kitchen:

 

I made chocolate candy cane truffles and raspberry-almond thumbprint cookies, and Zan pitched in peanut butter balls and peppermint bark.  Both of Zan’s treats came out fabulously well, and the thumbprints were ahhhhhh-mazing, but I was disappointed in my truffles.  I used to make them so often that I had them down to a science, but I guess I’ve lost my touch because the texture of these seemed off.  People still ate them, though.

We had so much fun hanging with our friends and making messes in the kitchen and family room.  The highlight of the evening, though, was watching Peanut flirt with Paul.  I’ve never seen her take to a non-related male so well.  She is crazy for her daddy, of course, and she loves her grandpas and my brother, but she’s always been extremely wary of any other man.  Not so with Paul, though.  She spent most of the evening climbing on him, serenading him with the “Muffin Man” song, and exhorting him to “Look at the tree, Uncle!”  So funny.  Poor Paul just wanted to watch football… and I’m a wee bit ashamed to admit that Zan and I were too busy laughing at him to pull the little monkey off his back.

After our fun evening with our Zan and Paul, we put in one more day at the office and then it was off to Albany to celebrate the holiday with my side of the family.  We spent Tuesday night observing our tradition of dinner and lights in Washington Park with our very dear old friend Seth.

Seth was in the holiday spirit for sure!  Would you believe that we’ve kept this tradition going for thirteen years now?  Seth and I met as freshmen at Cornell and quickly became good friends.  We started our lights-and-dinner tradition back in 2001, when we were juniors in college.  Hubby joined us for the first time in 2005 (our first married Christmas), and the only year we’ve missed was 2012.  (The lights are up by Thanksgiving, so we’ve been able to carry on our tradition even in years that hubby and I spent Christmas in Buffalo and Thanksgiving in Albany, but in 2012 we stayed in D.C. for both holidays, since Peanut was so very tiny and still fragile at the time.)

Even though we saw Seth last Christmas, he had never met Peanut – we left her home with Nana in 2013.  We had high hopes, after the way Peanut took to Paul, that Seth would be a similar hit.  She wasn’t quite as obsessed with him as she was with Paul (still laughing, over here) but she warmed up to him fast, especially after we clued him in on the secret to Peanut’s affections: pretend your hand is a bunny and hop it around the table.  I can’t resist that move, either.  (Just kidding.)

Anyway, we enjoyed an early dinner at The Merry Monk, the same Belgian restaurant our little group hit in 2013 – hubby was craving mussels and Belgian beer in a big way.  We enjoyed a Bavarian pretzel appetizer, and all three of us got mussels.  Seth and hubby got their beers; Peanut and I stuck to water.  The food was as delicious as I remembered it, and then it was time for…

Lights!  The display in Washington Park is actually really good.  We saw all of our old favorites (I love the Victorian Village) and there were a few new installations this year.  (All photos courtesy of Seth, who was snapping away with my iPhone in the front seat while I pointed out the best displays to Peanut in the back.)

All of the installations were good, but the highlight was…

R2-D2!  He was new this year.  Hubby thought he looked more like Mr. Potato Head, but Seth and I thought he looked just like the original.  May the force be with you, Artoo!  (Nerd alert: that’s how his name is spelled in the books.)

The next day was Christmas Eve.  We visited my grandmama in the morning and spent the rest of the day quietly at my parents’ house – playing with Peanut, wrapping gifts, and attending the 6:00 p.m. church service.  (We’d hoped to go at 4:00, but when my parents arrived at the church at 3:30, intending to save us seats, it was already standing room only, so they turned around and drove right back home.)  After church we enjoyed a dinner of crab cakes prepared by my dad – yum – and then crept into our beds to wait for Santa…

And Santa definitely didn’t forget us this year!

Peanut was up early on Christmas morning, clamoring to go downstairs.  I don’t think she really understood that there were presents down there, so it was pure coincidence that she was tugging at us from 6:30 onward, shrieking, “Go downstairs!  WANT GO DOWNSTAIRS!”  We made her wait until Nana and Grandad woke up, and we were down opening presents by 7:30.

Peanut did well, as usual.  She’s definitely on the nice list.  She got Tinker Bell, Periwinkle and Zarina dolls, stuffed Pooh and friends, and plenty of books, games, toys and clothes.  We had a nice Christmas too, but the best part was seeing Peanut experience the morning.  She was a little bit skeptical at first, and Nana ended up opening most of her presents for her, but Peanut was definitely interested in what was in those packages – especially when she saw a bit of pixie wing or Eeyore tail revealed.  Oh, and Nana got some cabin socks, which Peanut also attempted to claim for herself.

You can laugh all you want, but I think the best part for me was seeing Peanut open up her Weebles treehouse.  Anyone else have Weebles as a kid?  I had the Weebles haunted house and it was one of my favorite toys.  (I don’t know what became of it, but it was a lot of fun there for a good long while.)  I don’t know if Weebles went away and were suddenly brought back, or if I’m just in tune with the hot toddler toys now where I wasn’t before, but I was irrationally excited when I saw the Weebles treehouse on a list of the top gifts for the preschool set.  I knew Peanut had to have it.

Okay, I wanted to play with it too.

Fortunately, Peanut seems to really like her Weebles treehouse… and her Pixie Hollow friends… and the Hundred Acre Wood crew… and her mouse slippers… and everything else that Santa left for her this year.  Like I said, she was definitely on the nice list.

And there you have it – our Christmas festivities in one big photo dump!  I have another big recap coming up later in the week – my baby shower, which we celebrated on the Saturday after Christmas!  Can’t wait to share all that cuteness with you…

Merry Christmas again, my friends!  I hope your holiday week was as full of laughter and joy as ours was.