christmas aftermath

Hello! Did you have a nice Christmas? I did, though like I say every year at this time, I'm glad it's over. It was three days in a row of get-togethers, too much food, wine, presents, and late nights. Lovely and memorable times, but a bit overwhelming for this introvert.

A couple of fun photos from Christmas Eve:

My son wearing beard ornaments.

My cousin's wife, my cousin, and my sister ~ "proper" ladies. 

Christmas Day was just the three of us (six, if you include the three cats) at home. I made my famous breakfast casserole and French Press coffee and we settled in to open presents. 

My main gift to my Brian was this personalized keychain from The Vintage Pearl. I know it's hard to tell from this photo, but the strap is leather engraved with an "R" (the first letter of our last name) and the hammered silver circle has all our names on it (Brian, Melanie, Philip, Timothy). 

My main gift from Brian were these beautiful earrings from Sundance.

Tim loves to get me cat-themed things...this year it was a variety of socks, plus this wine glass. 😻 Of course, the cats were in the thick of the present opening and they got presents, too ~ a new scratching post and some catnip-filled mice. I wanted to post a photo of the cats on Christmas morning, but either my phone or laptop isn't cooperating with transferring photos. I use OneDrive on both devices and since OneDrive is a cloud storage, the photos I take with my phone usually go straight to my laptop. But, not lately. Sometimes they don't go at all. Other times - like at Christmas - only some of my photos appeared on my laptop. I've even tried manually sharing photos from my phone to different apps - OneDrive and Dropbox - and they still don't show up on my laptop. Frustrating!

 The day after Christmas, we headed to Barnes and Noble for our annual pick-up of calendars, planners, and Christmas cards ~ all at 50% off.

I've already taken down the Christmas decorations and last night, Brian helped me pack them away. We take all the decor down to the basement family room, lay the items out on the bar, drag the Tote bins out from storage, and get busy. We're always supervised by a cat.

I've always been like this, where on the 26th I declare, "Christmas is over! I'm done enjoying it to the point where I'm kind of sick of all the clutter. I know some of you can relate and others can't fathom taking down Christmas decorations until at least after January 1st. It's a personal choice and it's all good, no matter what you decide to do.