I'll Be Home For Christmas

It's almost Christmas and for the first time in years I am actually working LESS over the next few weeks. When you work in the restaurant or retail industry, Christmas season is bittersweet in a lot of ways. On one hand, it's busier and there are more shifts available to work. On the other hand, it's busier and there are more shifts available to work. I see my old co-workers addressing this paradox on Facebook and I can say that while I do miss the hustle of the holiday crowd, I don't miss missing out on the seasonal festivities.

Like getting to take our nieces and nephew to
the Macy's light show in Philly

Weekends are non-existent when you work in a restaurant, ESPECIALLY around the holidays. You need to really pick and choose which Christmas party (parties, if you're lucky) you want to attend because you aren't likely to get all the weekends off you want. In fact, in only just struck me that I've been to three Christmas parties this year alone and I can't remember ANY in the last few years. Granted, we threw one of the parties, but still.

Christmas parties everywhere! 

Photo booth fun from Tom's office Christmas party

This is our first Christmas in our new house AND my first Christmas working in an office. It's kind of like being back in school. I'm sitting at a desk all day, counting down until work lets out tomorrow evening and I don't have to go back for five days. There is both less and more work to do at the same time, but everyone is a little happier, a little chattier and there are snacks everywhere you look.

There are Calvin and Hobbes snow themed comics all around
my office.

I get to pass these on my way to the restroom!

Really puts you in the holiday spirit

Almost as much as getting a "Gingerdead man"
from Scott at the office





















Last week the office even invited Santa to come in! He was there on Saturday so I didn't get a chance to see what my odds were of coming in on the Nice list this year. I actually wanted to ask him about that. Do Tom and I file together this year? Since we're married, does our Naughty and Nice get combined? Maybe we are in a different gift bracket? Oh well, I will have to ask next year. I did get a chance to chill in his sleigh, though.




Santa's office

My cheerful lunch break

At our house we busied ourselves over the last few weeks getting ready for Christmas and our first party at our house. We finally got to get a real tree! We were so excited to get our tree, in fact, that we braved the elements and bought our tree during a literal down pour. It was freezing and wet but we got a tree! The perfect one, too; short and fat and fits perfectly in our small living room.



The helpful Home Depot dude spent ten minutes
getting soaked trying to help us secure our
tree to our little car

But we made it home with the tree intact!





And now it looks like it always belonged there

                               





















I even got Tom to set up my Dicken's Village collection. I've been collecting these things for years and never took them out of the box before. Some of the boxes had several centimeters of dust on them. Centimeters doesn't sound like much, but when you're sneezing over a bunch of old boxes, every centimeter counts.

They look pretty nice

Good job, Tom!

 Adding to the fun of getting ready for Christmas was the stress of getting ready to host our housewarming / Christmas party. As former service staff and enthusiastic party hosters, we naturally bought way too much food, tried far too many new recipes and started doing everything (cleaning included) far too late. I think I slept less than ten hours that weekend, from Friday to Monday morning. On the plus side, I think we had a pretty good party all in all.

Snacks beneath my requisite Advent calendar
Supplied every year by my godmother

Only the very beginning of our ambitious party menu

 In an effort to keep everyone entertained, we set up a few things to do in each room. In our guest room, we set up a video camera for people to leave us messages. My friend Dana's daughter, Kylie, turned it into her interview station. She was quite the pro at working the camcorder as well as working the crowd. On my to-do list is definitely to get that video edited down so I can share it with you. Actually, I'm excited to see it myself!

Another station was our Christmas card station. Just in case anyone wanted to send a well wish or a Merry Christmas to someone. A few people had fun with it, but of course, how many people's addresses do you know off the top of your head?

I thought it was a cute idea



Like any good holiday party we had wayyyyy too much food. Including an abundance of cheese. One of our friends saw our morning to-do list (with all the last minute cooking we should have done the night before) and exclaimed how great it was that we had not one, but two different "cheese breads" on there. Both cheese breads came out pretty awesome, but how could they not? What is better than cheese and bread?



This was cheese bread #1. Also, I would call it
a Pinterest win!

The rainbow cheese at Wegman's looked too
pretty to resist



Our signature cocktail: Christmas Mojitos



The best champagne mustard dip you've ever tasted
Recipe courtesy of Mama Riz



And I did consult Pinterest quite a lot on this holiday venture. You can find my board here: http://www.pinterest.com/sherideez/christmas-party/ I didn't get to do all the recipes, but all the ones I did were pretty good.



Gingerbread cheesecake dip was super easy and really delicious.
It's pretty rich, so your probably don't need to double the
recipe like we thought we did. My office was happy to have the
leftovers, though.

Oreo popcorn bark was a huge hit! I'm making gift bags
of this stuff to give out next year.



 There were a few Pinterest fails along the way...



I wanted the chocolate fountain to work so badly.
It did not.
It did make for an interesting conversation piece.

These also looked quite different on Pinterest.

But no matter. The food was delicious if not beautiful, the friends were plentiful if not... haha, just kidding! Good times were had by all that came and we were so happy to get to see so many of our friends and family in one day. In fact, we had an extra visitor we weren't expecting...

Blurry Santa on a fire truck!

It was a great party and I have to thank my friends that came early to help us set up. There is literally no way we would have gotten my optimistic menu all put together so nicely if not for you guys. I might have been curled up on the kitchen floor, covered in gingerbread cheesecake dip and sprinkles, crying that we couldn't possibly have enough cheese. Instead, the party went off without a hitch. It was busy, but fun to host and we got to chill out with Tom's kindergarten crew, who are amazingly just as good of friends today as they were back in the sandbox. Wait, did we have sandboxes in kindergarten?

You can't take Dev anywhere

Say kimchi! 

 That party was over a week ago now and we are STILL cleaning up from it. Between work and going to other Christmas fun things, cleaning and organizing just doesn't compete on the to-do list. Tonight we finally got the kitchen more or less put back together, although we still have extra bags of chips and pretzels and candy that I don't even know where to put. If you are having a party and need some supplies, check with us! We might be able to donate a few things in exchange for an invitation.

Tonight at 6:30, I get to leave work and not return for five whole days. It's crazy! I won't even know what to do with myself. Well, maybe I do. Tomorrow night, Tom and I will go to Tran Siberian Orchestra, a show we walked out on two years ago when we were overly excited from getting engaged an hour before and just had to go shout it from the rooftops. We got free tickets and that makes me so happy about walking out on the show (and the money we dropped on the not-so-cheap tickets) before.

Finally get to see this dude go crazy on the violin

The reason we didn't see him before

Christmas Eve will be spent doing my last minute Christmas shopping. No, seriously, MOST of my Christmas shopping. Kinda dropped the ball on that one this year. But by the grace of old St. Nick, it will be done. Then I will help cook and clean at one more holiday party, my mom's annual Christmas Eve party. Christmas day will be spent bouncing back and forth between our parents' houses, our own house for Christmas movies and Lai Lai Garden for a Chinese Christmas duck. After that, I will be asleep for the rest of the weekend thankyouverymuch.

My to-do list consists mainly of shopping and wrapping these last minute gifts that really shouldn't have been last minute. What do you usually do the few days leading up to Christmas? Are you as unorganized as I am? Or are you all shopped and wrapped by mid-October and now you can relax and actually chill during the holiday frenzy?

Whatever you do these next few days, I hope you get to spend at least a little time with some friends or family. And if you don't, at least know they are thinking about you. And, hey, if you have nothing better to do, my mom's house is always open Christmas Eve!

And now I leave you with the gift left to us by Tom's friends after our party. Merry Christmas everyone!

Poor guy didn't stand a chance