Christmas Festivities!!

For Christmas this year we stayed in Seattle. I'm so glad we did - as usual, snowstorms locked up the midwest and would have made traveling really stressful, plus I'm pregnant, AND all our friends were in town this year!!

This is us with our posse:One among us owns a house and offered to host Christmas dinner on Friday. On Thursday, we had everyone over for lunch before we all headed down to the Seattle Center (Space Needle) to do some Christmas ice skating, carousel riding, and hot-chocolate drinking.

Unfortunately the ice skating rink closed right when we got there, but we avoided a tantrum with the promise of double carousel rides which seemed to satiate everyone.


Next we headed indoors where they had set up an awesome tiny-town with a running train set (and conductor!) and nearby hot chocolate brought to us by Starbucks. We loaded up and took the tour of the town. Each of us found something we really liked. We picked out where we would live and keep our horses and go out to play. Even the adults got caught up in the fantasy - I read all the newspaper articles about the 'townspeople' and one of the dads discovered a ravine that he explained to us would be perfect for dumping all the garbage he had at his house.

The village - doesn't it look real from this vantage point?

On Christmas morning we opened presents with our friends C & R and their daughter L who came down from Vancouver to visit and bring us some ketchup chips. L got a pink tutu skirt from us and some tights and a stocking full of surprises from Santa.


She's originally from Brazil so she and her parents were excited to learn that Santa does a lot of things differently here in the US (like fill stockings and come down the chimney!). L couldn't believe it when Santa ate the cookies she left out (and wrote her a note! and left the front of the fireplace open!), and we adults figured out a big secret to Santa's success - he drops presents off in Brazil DAYS before Christmas, leaving lots of time to visit kids in the US in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve.

After we opened presents, the Studly Hubby whipped up his favorite holiday dish, chorizo stuffing, and we took it and a bunch of other food over to J & C's house where their kids hadn't even gotten 1/10 of the way through their pile of presents under the Christmas tree. Even then, they had plenty of new things for everyone to play with.

L and her best Christmas friend H with their pretty new scarves and a pile of toys.

We had a wonderful Christmas dinner with lots of amazing dishes (with a particularly outstanding pile of desserts - a vegan yule log, cherry and pumpkin pies and homemade whip cream!), and then we all went out after to walk it off down the block where there was a pretty impressive Christmas Lights show.



All in all it was a great Christmas! And I don't have pictures but a great big THANKS to all the people who sent packages of great presents for us to open on Christmas morning - it gave us lots to play with over the weekend after everyone left!