Green Christmas in CA & Happy New Year!
Christmas this year was very weird. As it was the very first Christmas I haven’t spent with my family, it was understandably a bit disappointing - but it’s not like I haven’t seen them all year. With the wedding stuff (mostly ours) from 2007 and more coming in 2008, we’ll be traveling to the East Coast more than we have since we moved out here! But back to Christmas…it was happily our first married Christmas, and as with most things in this first year of marriage we’ll be looking to perhaps make some of our own new traditions.
Let me back up a little…About a week before Christmas, I came home to find the room divider up in the living room (we usually use it to separate the “dining” area from the rest of the living room, but it hadn’t been up for a while after Thanksgiving), so I was a little curious as to what might be hiding behind it, especially since all the lights were out and I could see a glowing behind it. Kris had bought a tiny 2-foot tree, green and red tinsel, and a small string of lights, and had it set up for my arrival home from the lab! It was so sweet, even though I didn’t really want to get a tree and start accumulating the million holiday decorations yet - since we’re living in a small place without a lot of excess storage space and we don’t have room for all sorts of tchotchkes. Of course I still loved the tree and Kris’s effort to make our holiday more homey.
In the meantime, packages had started arriving. There were two big boxes from Tupperware (presumably the remainder of our Tupperware registry, but pre-Christmas I had no idea what might be coming from or where). We received another package from my Aunt Linda with some cute Christmas decorations, which we placed around to put ourselves in the holiday spirit. My mom had sent two packages - one full of tins of Christmas cookies and presents, and a second which she told us to open right away. It contained two small candy cane ornaments with our names on them, which fit perfectly on our little tree. I also received a package which I had forgotten was coming - the preserved flowers from my wedding bouquet! It turned out so lovely, the colors are darkened, but still beautiful. I’m so glad I found a company to do what I wanted (in case you’re wondering, I went through Keepsake Floral - they’re located in Florida, but you can ship your flowers there from anywhere, and they have all the pricing and everything right there on the website - it’s not hidden like with other companies). What a nice Christmastime surprise!
More packages - a huge box from Kris’s family - and Christmas cards arrived in the following days. We started wrapping presents for each other, and soon there was a pile of festive presents waiting under our Christmas tree on the table. We made some last-minute plans to have our neighbor/couplefriends Jason and Andrea over for dinner on Christmas, and our own plans for Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve, we prepared a traditional dish of pasta fagioli and enjoyed some holiday tv specials before getting ready for church. We decided to go to the 6pm mass on Christmas Eve at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the church we had done Pre-Cana through. The church itself was decorated really nicely for the holiday, and mass was the same as it usually is on Christmas Eve, except they did the readings for the Christmas Vigil (Mass at Midnight), which was weird because it was only 6pm and they had another mass scheduled for midnight. There was a band and choir who provided wonderful music, as well as a last-minute “nativity walkthrough,” which was basically a whole bunch of families from the parish who carried the baby Jesus around the church, reciting short passages from the bible as they passed the doll onto the next group, and finally placing him upon the manger display in the front of the church. I think it sounds stranger than it actually was, but I’m not sure how else to describe it! Afterwards, we took a drive into Tustin, where, Kris had found out, they have a holiday decoration display contest every year. This was a GREAT way to continue my family’s Christmas Eve tradition of driving around looking at holiday lights and decorations. Kris had printed up a small map of the area with the greatest concentration of holiday displays - because you can login and post that your house has lights - so we found that area and drove around. Let me just say - these people go ALL out! Some of them empty their garages for a whole big display of Christmas villages and train sets. Other people did a whole computer coordinated music, light, and anamitronics show, while everyone else seemed to either A) not bother or B) buy the same giant blow-up snowglobe things and NOEL signs with penguins from Costco that everyone else did. It was still a lot of fun, but also kinda strange since the temperature was pretty mild (Kris and I laughed after mass when someone outside said “It’s so cold!”) - at one point we just parked the car so we could get up and personal with some of the more outstanding displays. I think the funniest part was that a lot of people had gotten that cotton stuffing stuff and staked it into their front yard to make it look like it had snowed! 
Ha! Snow in Southern California! 
We tried to cap off the drive home with some holiday Starbucks, but it was closed (even though all the lights were on!), so we made our way back for some hot chocolate and Christmas cookies. I had to make a small detour to look in on my friends’ cats while they were away in Utah, and while I was gone Santa came! Kris had brought down all his presents and more that he’d been hiding all December, and there were two stockings hung by the chimney….I mean TV. With our tree lit and cocoa in hand, we sat and watched another short Rankin & Bass “animated” classic Christmas movie before heading off to bed.
On Christmas morning we slept in as long as we could before getting up to start the turkey prep, same as we did on Thanksgiving. As soon as we finished that, we got down to some gift exchanging! We took some pictures, and then gave the families a call. The mystery of where the “other” Tupperware had come from was solved (it didn’t come with any shipping info or notice), and we got to share the holiday in a small part with our families. The only thing we were missing was a white Christmas - the weather out here that day was so mild and warm it seemed like it was almost Christmas in July!
Before we knew it, it was time to finish prepping the rest of the food - green bean and sweet potatoes - and Jason and Andrea had arrived with salad, rolls, and potato gratin. The turkey was done by this point, but I still had to make the gravy, so we enjoyed some wine with our friends and then proceeded to dig in. After dinner we played a game of Triominos - a childhood favorite of mine that I’d played with my Grandma and Grandpa. We cleaned up dinner, exchanging leftovers, and then enjoyed a dessert of apple pie and a variety of Christmas cookies, all of which we’d received from our families from back east.
A week later, we decided as a last minute plan to have Jason and Andrea over again. We all decided it would be best to have a small thing - get together after dinner and possibly celebrate before midnight. However, we got all involved with another round of Triominos, and a card game that they’d brought that roughly translated as “Not for Oxen” and before we knew it was five minutes til midnight. So we turned on the tv, did the countdown, kissed our respective spouses, popped the champagne, and toasted the New Year! We played another round of the card game, finished the bottle of champagne, and said good night. It was a great way to finish and start the year. 
