A recap -holiday style

I hope you all had a fantastically magical Christmas. It's hard to believe that at this point, it's all over. All that stress and worry, and now, it's finished. I say this every year, but I'll say it again...next year, I will be prepared earlier! There will be NO stress, and I will not darken the door of any mall, shop or corner store 2 days before!

On account of my mom and brother being in Ontario to celebrate Christmas, it was a little quieter this year with less running around. Christmas Eve, we headed over to Chris' parents' house for supper, and had a bowl of some DELICIOUS seafood chowder, and of course topped the meal with a few shortbread cookies (Rose is a bit of a cookie connoisseur and she makes fan-freaking-tastic shortbreads!). From there, we headed to the Bowlans's annual Christmas Eve party. I don't know how Rhonda does it every year. Her house is wall-to-wall people yet she's mingling amongst them all, taking care to ensure she has a moment with everyone, all the while serving up a host of delicious appetizers - most from the oven, along with plates and plates of desserts, hot cider on the stove, and she even had a bottle of wine *ahem* for me (I do hope someone else helped finish it off). Thank you, once again, Bowlans for a fantastic, holidayrific evening! After mingling at the Bowlans we headed back to his parents' for another visit & picked up our prezzies and then headed on home to crash.

Sleeping turned out to be a bit of a challenge, I'll admit. I 'blame' the fact that the bed was so freaking cold I couldn't warm up, and therefore, could not get to sleep. However, I do suppose that a teensy bit of excitement was potentially part of my sleep issue as well. I'm like a little kid - it's pathetic! :). Who doesn't love getting to open presents? After a bit of tossing and turning, we finally decided to rise out of bed by about 10am. I made us coffee and we had breakfast as we opened our stockings. Chris seemed to enjoy all of his loot, even managing to not complain too much when it came to the new Old Navy jeans and t-shirts (he claims to have boycotted ON on account of their hideous mannequin ad campaign). A few of the highlights for him were the Wii Super Mario Bros game, the new Matt Andersen CD from his Phoenix performance, and the picture I framed of him and his granddad (I even saw a little tear). I guess Santa Amber did ok.

Santa Chris also faired out rather fantastically. He brought me a pair of silver hoop earrings, a Bon Jovi coffee table book that is drool-worthy, a cool CSI game for the Wii and a converting device to convert slides to digital format. Probably my most favourite of the gifts were the heart shaped "two hearts, one love" diamond pendant (soooo beautiful), and by far the biggest cry of the season was when I opened up the small album that he had filled with converted pictures (from slides I had saved) of myself and my Dad from when I was a baby. He'd used the converter to see how it worked. I still tear up just thinking about it. That's just one of the examples of how thoughtful of a guy Chris is...and explains just how special he really is to me, and how much I love him. Thank you so much Chris...that gift alone made my Christmas. xoxo.
We made our way to Chris' parents' house again for Christmas dinner and visited for a few hours (even getting a chance to say hello to Chris' granddad on the phone which was super special). Thereafter, we headed to Rustico to see the Christmas lights. It was lightly snowing which made it much more Christmas-y. For any non-local readers who may have stopped by, Rustico is a little fishing community and they go completely Griswald for Christmas. It's insane, but neat. I wouldn't want to pay their electric bill though.