Merry Christmas!

Had a wonderful Christmas! We ate fantastic food with fun family, and all of my baking came together perfectly:

Every year it is a tradition that we have a round of White Elephant, which always involves much laughter. This year I got a pretty cool gift, a wine bottle filled with Christmas lights, like this one:

Tutorial here.

Christmas Eve...

...a fulfilling (if early) morning volunteering; making ADORABLE Christmas goodies; a festive church service; a DELICIOUS dinner of lobster bisque, escargot, and king crab legs; and opening presents!

And it's not even Christmas yet!

Looking forward to tomorrow, a day full of fun and food with this silly bunch (aka my family):

Gift exchange

Today I exchanged gifts with my friends. We munched on the cookies I made the other night and the peppermint bark Gracy made (soon to be blogged about when I give it a try!) and gave each other little presents.

I gave the girls knitted headbands with crocheted flowers!

Christmas cookies

Feels like Christmas here in Colorado where I spent the day shopping with my mother. The stores were hectic and the traffic unbelievable. On the bright side however, it snowed! We have about six inches on the ground right now, so we spent the evening decorating cookies!

Using the same frosting I used on the apple braid (minus the nutmeg, plus food coloring)...

 ...we turned these plain ol' thangs into...

...these fancy shmancy ones!

Decorating the Christmas tree

Now that Thanksgiving is over, we can all give in to the Christmas frenzy! I've been dying for it to be acceptable to embrace the Christmas spirit since before Halloween (shh!). We started with decorating the Christmas tree before my brother and I went back to school. 

Every year my mother gives us each an ornament. This year mine was a cupcake! Clearly she knows about my Pinterest obsession.

With some Christmas carols and some eggnog, we proceeded to decorate the Christmas tree. It started like this...

...and turned into this!

Happy holiday season!