Our California Christmas (part 1)

Let me start off by saying that we had a fantastic trip to California.  The weather was beautiful, warm and we enjoyed all the food and company immensely!

me and Amy at lunch

Our first full day in CA was Friday.  It was nice to have a day that was somewhat of a relaxing one before the holiday rush.  We met up with my best friend Amy at the newly installed Five Guys & Burgers place a few blocks from home.  We sat outside, goofed off with the fancy new soda machine, and just enjoyed the delicious food.  We spent the rest of the day playing old school Mario on the Wii and laughing at the old mix CDs I made in high school.  Zak teased me for all of the terrible bands I used to listen to, but I found a few gems here and there!  Kenny and Jenna had some evening activities to attend to, but we had a quick family meal of salmon, yum!  While they were out, my parents and Zak & I helped put up ornaments on the tree and watched the movie Elf.

Christmas Eve with my family consists of a big family dinner, a little program put on by the cousins, and cousin gift exchange.  The dinner is more or less Thanksgiving dinner, with a few holiday bonuses.  Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, creamed spinach, creamed onion, yam & apples, rolls, raspberry fruit jello, oh everything is so wonderful.  And you always think if you get small enough portions of everything, you can go back and have a little bit more.  Nope.  I was stuffed and sad, because it's been awhile since I had my aunt Karri's famous rolls, or the gravy my grandma makes.  But we had enough for leftovers the next day!

a nice one of us, I just wished I hadn't messed up the exposure on my camera, oh well!

waiting for dinner with Sasha and Jenna

a nice picture

and a goofier one

our whole family!

When the cousins were little, one of the oldest ones, Sasha, would help put together a little Christmas program for everyone.  It usually involved playing instruments, singing, reading Christmas books or poems, etc.  This year we had a nice program.  My grandma usually puts on the Christmas program in the Cambodian branch in Oakland for church, and we did a simplified version of that.  I played the keyboard and sang with Jenna, my cousins Allie and Sasha and/or with Kenny.  The boy cousins read verses from the scripture, my aunt read a family favorite, The Journey of the Magi, a poem by T.S. Eliot.  It was a nice time.  We did the cousin gift exchange (Zak got a $25 Amazon gift card to do what he pleases with, I had to wait until Wednesday because Grant, Ali & Annalise were in Utah with Ali's family, but that was fine with me) and eventually went home and to bed.

On Christmas, my siblings and I always got up unnaturally early to go through our stockings and open our gifts from Santa.  Kenny was bummed that initially Jenna and I weren't having that, since we now want to sleep in.  But we agreed to a little pact to get up around 7.  It was hard to say no to Kenny, who has spent the last 2 Christmases in Sweden.  So we all got up early and looked through our stockings.  Santa brought us the game Taboo, as well as some nice soaps for Zak, a set of silicone whisks, new spatula set and measuring spoon set for me, and some Thai curry cashews for Zak as well.  Zak's co-worker's roommate is the manager at our Bath & Body Works, so he scored 3 big bottles of different body sprays, and a body cream for me, I was impressed with the good choices he made.  Jenna wanted to play the new Lego Harry Potter (years 5-7) on the Wii, so we did that until our parents got up.  We heated up the tea ring (similar to cinnamon rolls, but better) Grandma made for us, got dressed and went to church for an hour.  I think it was the first time at church with my family that I haven't gone up to play the piano or sing, it was so nice to sit with Zak the entire meeting!  It was nice to see old church members and friends.  My best friend very talented family sang/played instruments, which was beautiful.

decorated mantle

our pretty tree

still looking nice, after church

a decent one of us

in our "jim-jams"

After church, we changed back into our new pjs ('jim-jams', as Jenna calls them), and opened our gifts.  Zak got me some beautiful pearl cluster drop earrings that I've been in love with since they got them in the store.  He also got me the Sims 3 game for the PS3.  Neither one of us have played anything related to the Sims before, so we were excited to try it.  I got him a nice leather belt he specifically told me about, two visual companion guides to a show we love dearly, Firefly, and, unfortunately, the wrong cologne.  I felt really bad, but explained that there were four similarly named ones, but I was smart to keep the receipt and we exchanged it for the correct one back home.

I was excited to give out the presents we got for my family: Dad got all of the Oakland A's World Series games on DVD, as well as a cool puzzle with all of the vintage pennants from the MLB.  I made Mom a series of magnets from places and of people she loves: a scene of fall back east (she grew up in PA), Hawaii (born there), the Oakland Temple, Yosemite national park, a picture of all 6 of us from this summer at the California Academy of Sciences in S.F., and a collage of some pictures of all of us: a wedding picture of me & Zak, Kenny & Jenna at Disneyland, all 3 of us siblings at the airport when Kenny got home from Sweden, and a goofy one of us 3 trying to do one of the jumping pictures in S.F. right before Kenny left.  I was really pleased with them.  I made Jenna this cute calendar journal thing I saw on-line: I took a bunch of index cards, cut them in half, then stamped the date on them.  And then found 12 vintage postcards to use as month dividers.  So every day she can write on a card about something fun or significant that happened that day on that year.  And then the next year, do the same.  I made my mom one for her birthday and she loved it; I also made one for myself and it's a cute idea.  We got Kenny the show I mentioned previously, Firefly.  We made him watch it while he was here and he got just as addicted as we did!  He was thrilled.  They all were.

We opened some nice and fun gifts, including: the book Earth, by Jon Stewart (been dying for this book!), some brown 501s for Zak, a coat for me, a nice big saucepan, a California calendar, some weird art things my siblings found at a thrift store, and the movies Serenity & Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Jenna was pumped about her boys shark slippers from Old Navy (she's been super into sharks and marine biology, she's planning on majoring in it), Kenny was happy to receive a George Foreman grill (our cousins also got similar grills, oh the joys!).  My mom got these beautiful plates from Williams & Sonoma, it was so cute to see how excited she was.  After all the wrapping paper was thrown away, we lazed about for a bit.  Mom wanted to make her famous thick, soft Christmas cookies with eggnog for later, so I helped her frost and decorate them.  It was fun to help her with them; I had tried make them previously for our friends' party and while they were a success, nothing beats my mom's, who has made these for years.

pretty and tasty cookies!

We headed over to the grandparents' mid-afternoon.  We had waffles, sausage and quiche for brunch on Christmas day.  My mom recently got a fancy waffle maker, so she brought that and made delicious Belgian waffles.  The rest of the day was low-key.  We opened presents from my grandparents.  Well, actually, my grandparents sent us some money before we left, so we just enjoyed watching other people open stuff.  Although I was jealous of Kenny getting the complete Star Wars collection on Blu-Ray, sweet deal.  Then we played Taboo for awhile, which is always fun.  We eventually had the cookies and eggnog, leftovers from the previous night and stuffed ourselves, again.  And just sat around and talked.  It was a nice day.

Since that turned out to be a huge post, I will write about the rest of our trip later!

*if I can get my act together to get some pictures of our gifts, I'll post them, but you'll have to do with this for now :)*