Happy Holidays!

This was our first Christmas in our new house and I was excited to continue our old traditions, and start new ones. Last weekend Kevin, Emily, and Zach assembled the Christmas Village in the dining room (which worked out just great considering we don’t have any furniture in there). It looks nice but we have so many houses and villagers that they all didn’t fit on the table so we couldn’t put them all out. I think it’s time to buy another folding table, for next year!

Over the past week we all baked various forms of cookies. Kevin and Zach made cut-out sugar cookies, I made peanut butter blossoms, and Emily made chocolate chip as well as peanut butter/chocolate swirls. They were all so delicious! I have not been very good on the diabetes diet this week, in large part because of those cookies! Santa enjoyed them all, and gobbled them up. He drank all his milk too.

We have found a new church in Framingham and went to the 4:00 p.m. mass on Christmas Eve. Note for next year – we really should go to the family mass at 6:00 p.m. The church was filled by the time we got there, and they sat us in the choir loft (a new experience for me). It was so quiet at times in the church you could have heard a pin drop – except for Zach’s chatting throughout most of the service. And since we were in the choir loft, they had hanging microphones to capture the choir’s voices, so I was sitting in fear that they could hear clearly everything we said up there. I tried my best to keep him quiet, but Zach doesn’t know much about “inside” voice yet. Oh well. Hopefully everyone in the church thought we was charming and cute anyway.

Following mass we drove around and looked at the lights in Framingham. More so than Brookline, Framingham decorates quite lavishly for the holidays! (the individual homes that is, not the downtown) We found a new Chinese restaurant for our traditional Christmas Eve Chinese food dinner and it was delicious! And extremely crowded. We apparently aren’t the only family who goes out for Chinese for Christmas Eve – this place was hopping!

Following cookies for Santa, stories, and prayers, Zach had a good night’s sleep and woke us up around 8:00 a.m. I actually woke up earlier than that and got the coffee going and turned on the tree lights and got breakfast ready. Emily apparently thought we’d let her sleep in luxuriously until whenever she decided to wake up and then we’d open gifts. I think 8:00 was pretty good for a toddler, but Em wanted a few more hours of sleep. By 8:30 we were ready to see what Santa had brought us.

Unwrapping gifts took a really long time. It’s hard to tell a toddler that they can’t play with the gift they just opened because there are 500 more gifts for him under the tree to open. We finally got through everything about 2.5 hours later. Emily got some nice things, especially from our relatives and friends who sent packages (and money!), but also got gift cards and happily already used some of these at the mall over the weekend. Zach got a new kitchen, choo choo trains and track, an easel, toy tools, books, puzzles, and a million other things. Our house kind of looks like Toys R Us threw up in it. But we’re all having a blast reliving our childhoods and playing with his toys with him.

One of the best gifts we got on Christmas Day was the news that Kevin’s brother Scott proposed to his girlfriend Rachel! We are absolutely beyond thrilled as we love her to death and so happy to officially welcome her to the Mullen clan. Of course we’ve thought of her as family all along anyway, but so excited to make it legal.

I hope all of you had a beautiful holiday season this year as well, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, or something else entirely. Happy holidays and lots of love from our family to yours. That sounds kind of corny and like the end of a Christmas card, but I mean it!