Pumpkins

It was a hot day at the beginning of October, but doing something fall-ish was fun! 

We celebrated the season by walking down to the church that's a couple blocks away and picking pumpkins to carve! We met up with the Kings in the street and walked over together. 

Tuck wasn't remotely interested in the pumpkins, but he loved the sticks and pinecones all around. He'd gotten his cone off just an hour before, so he was enjoying his freedom.

Obviously, the dog was thrilled about this photo op.

  

We came back to our house and ordered a pizza from Midtown Pies for dinner. After watching Jeopardy (of course), we got to work carving!

I wasn't sure what to carve, so Christina suggested a dog for Tuck. Here's what I drew to carve, and I'm pretty glad that I didn't end up going with that. Thankfully, rubbing alcohol got the Sharpie off, and I carved a face instead that I could pull off better.

A group picture at the end of the night.

 Here they are in all their glory - we have mine, Carson's and Josh's. 

 Unfortunately, the humid air got to our pumpkins only a few days into life. This is a picture of them four days later, right before we tossed them. They didn't age very well, and mine looks horrified at the moldy mess Carson's became.

Christmas Traditions

This is one of my favorite times of year, so when I knew we'd be in Germany for it this year, I was a little sad. Germany does Christmastime well, so there's no shortage of things to do or see to get in the holiday spirit, but I knew I'd be missing our decorations and our little traditions.

I love traditions. Nobody reading this is surprised by that declaration, but I do. So here are traditions we have that we're missing, and how we're altering those for our time in Germany.

I miss our collection of Christmas books. We collect one each year and many of them are childhood favorites, and gathered from thrift stores. We pack them away each year and they're fun to take out and enjoy over the month of December. I did find a kids Christmas nativity book here in German so that I can practice my limited language skills, so maybe I'll translate it and write the translations in the book!

Christmas movies. I know it's so easy to stream movies, but I really like the collection we've built up of classic Christmas movies and some more silly recent ones (like Elf and The Santa Clause). In 2012, we made a big pot of soup and turned just the Christmas tree lights on and watched Christmas movies all day. It was so great that we've done it every year. Thankfully, Netflix and Amazon Video have an assortment of movies we can stream, although we're sad because Home Alone, a favorite of ours, was on German Netflix until the beginning of November and then disappeared without a word. Anyway, we're thinking we'll take a day right around Christmas and make some Christmas snacks and watch these movies all day.

Ornaments. We have so many, and as the years pass, I think we are going to approach the territory of too many. Favorites include our wedding toppers, which were a bride and groom alligator that I hot-glued ribbons to and hung on the tree and our now huge collection of ornaments from places we've been (sometimes if we can't find an actual ornament we like, we buy something that's cute that we can attach to ribbon and hang on the tree, like a pencil sharpener or a keychain). We've added to that collection since we've been here, faithfully finding something for our tree at home from far away, and since we've been so many places, we may need to get a second tree next year just for our Europe ornaments!

Advent calendar. Most years, we buy an advent calendar from World Market or Trader Joes for very cheap, and they have gross chocolate (in other words, I don't eat it and Carson does). This year, we are in the land of every advent calendar imaginable. And yet, when we went to the grocery store and remembered that oh yeah, we wanted an advent calendar, they didn't have one. I found a Christmas chocolate variety pack with 25 chocolates that came with a Christmas tree shaped stand you could make. I wrote numbers on each one with a sharpie and now we have another decoration plus advent calendar. Win-win, because the chocolate is pretty good (still too sweet).

Advent readings. Two years ago, I added this advent devotional book to our collection, and we've read it every day during the month of December and really enjoyed it. This year, of course I didn't remember to hunt down the book while we were packing to move, so I downloaded this one to my Kindle app because I thought it would be similarly good and reflective. We've appreciated it so far.

Christmas music. I really miss Pandora here, but it just doesn't work in Germany. While a bummer, I've discovered that Amazon Music is pretty good. If you have a Prime account, it allows you to stream without commercials, which is a perk over Pandora, and it allows you to choose stations or to create your own playlists, sort of like Spotify. So it's the best of both worlds, I guess. Something I regret not bringing to Germany is the Bluetooth speaker I got for Christmas last year. Our apartment is small enough that it doesn't really matter, but it would be nice to really turn up the Christmas tunes. Some of our favorite Christmas albums are Pentatonix's PTXmas and That's Christmas to Me - both Carson's favorites, Michael Buble Christmas (don't have any of his albums but enjoy them), Hillsong's We Have a Savior, and Sovereign Grace Music's Prepare Him Room. But I also enjoy the Christmas stations for a variety of classic Christmas songs.

Christmas stars. We have a star for the top of our tree at home, but over here, we've seen so many of these paper star lanterns. They often sell a light kit to put inside to make them all glowy and beautiful, but we opted not to get one, since we wouldn't be able to use it when we got back to the states. This will be an easy thing to carry home, since it folds up into a flat triangle. We see them in windows all over town and several booths at the Christmas markets specialize in these fun stars. We stuck a tiny tack in the ceiling and used white thread (I brought needles and thread with me, which was surely a waste of space since those are definitely available here and probably cheap) and it looks invisible which was the point. Might just leave this star up after Christmas to fill that blank white corner!

Christmas tree. This was by far the least amount of time we've spent on a tree. We have a fake tree at home and even though we prefer real ones, it's nice to not water a tree and to spend very little time setting it up! Our tiny tree here was one of two at the grocery store so we chose the ones that leaned the least (although now that it's here it's actually leaning quite a bit) and threw a strand of tiny battery operated lights shaped like Christmas trees and some cheap ball ornaments on it.

Super Bowl

Oh, a post about the Superbowl from those die-hard football fanatics? Excellent.

You know us... such sports-people.

The Superbowl has lots of snacks, funny commercials, a sometimes entertaining, sometimes not halftime show, and the game is sort of just the reason for all this carrying on.
So... I like to be there for the Superbowl. Last year, I went to a party, but this year, we stayed home, I made some tasty snacks (which made excellent leftovers throughout the week, you're welcome, Carson) and we did our own thing during the actual game part, but were very interested in the commercials.

We wanted the Seahawks to win. Being the die-hard fans that we are, we were super invested in their win and really cared so much. Or not, but we did accidentally wear various shades of blue and green and we did used to live in Washington and we didn't want the Patriots to win. Also I think it's fun to pick a team even if you don't care. But really we were there for the commercials. We watched part of an episode of LOST on Netflix and switched between that and the game because we couldn't miss the Budweiser Puppy commercials of course!

And by the way - this is probably my favorite Superbowl commercial ever, from a few years ago.

Here was our little spread.

I made these little corn dogs because I saw something similar online. I used a box mix of cornbread, heated the oven to 400, cut hot dogs into fourths (I would do fifths next time), stuck them in the middle of the cornbread batter in my mini muffin pan, and baked for 8 or 9 minutes. I think I would use vegetable oil or something else to make the cornbread less crumbly, but they were really good! And really simple. And cute.

And here we are, looking just fantastic. I was wearing a green tank top with my blue hoodie but you can't see it. And we were wearing shorts because it was 70 degrees. February is much more livable when you aren't afraid you'll freeze to death.

So, the Seahawks lost because they made a stupid move, but we didn't lose sleep over it. We were brushing our teeth as the game wrapped up, and went straight to bed. Obviously this is an advertisement for our fab parties. We are so much fun.

Until next year, NFL.

Christmas in the South

I was excited to go to Beaufort for Christmas this year. We've been a ton since we moved south in June, which has been fantastic, but I was really looking forward to this trip because I hadn't been home for Christmas since 2008. That was before I met Carson, so obviously he hasn't partaken in Norman or Conners family traditions ever. We certainly talked up the tamales to him, and he loves being with family for holidays too, so he was equally excited to make the trip. 

  

I will note though... he missed having a white Christmas. He might have been a little won over by the weather in the mid-sixties and pretty sunsets and the ability to wear short sleeves when it was sunny, but apparently, he still missed that white stuff. I still don't. I feel like I'm still thawing out, and I'm definitely back to my wimpy ways, where anything below 55 feels miserable, and I am not ashamed. (PS- Carson has gotten a little wimpier too. Warm weather will do that to ya.)

When I got off work on Christmas Eve, Carson and I hit the road. It was pouring rain when we left and the rain had been falling for several days, so there were cars that had hydroplaned into the median and were stuck in mud. Everyone else was going about 20 miles below the speed limit because it really wasn't safe to drive. About 45 minutes down the road, things cleared up and we had a safe, delay-free drive up to South Carolina. If you look closely at this picture, you'll see the funniest thing we've ever seen on the road: a dead deer strapped to the back of a tiny car. It's the silvery-white one in the picture, and a terrible picture, but the close-up would have been worse: the thing was not only strapped there but bleeding all over the back of the car. It was also weaving in and out of traffic at just under 100mph so it wasn't exactly a great idea to speed up and catch a picture.

We thankfully made it in time for the Christmas Eve service at 5pm. Went to Nana's first to freshen up a little bit, and then headed over to the church. We read scripture, sang carols, and listened to a message before we lit candles all over the auditorium.

Following that, we went back to Nana's house to eat too much food. Nana makes tamales, chili and pasole every year for Christmas Eve, and so for years, I'd spent time eating other things because these weren't my favorites. I did eat a few tamales this year, and they were great! Carson enjoyed his first tamales and was happy to eat chili that was adequately spicy.

We lounged around for a little after eating, full and sleepy. Eventually, we got ourselves up to a seated position and opened presents. Scott played "Santa" as he has for as long as I can remember, and passed out presents.

The highlight of the evening was little Luke, my cousin Amanda's son. He's 18 months old and such a character. He didn't get a nap that day, so he was exhausted and overwhelmed by all the goings-on. He provided great comedic relief for us though, body-slamming gift boxes and being confused by everything that was happening.

Here's a family picture by the tree, minus my sister and her husband because they were at their own Christmas-eve service.

Nana and I - nobody here is wearing heels.

My cousin Morgan (fun fact: I have a cousin named Morgan on both sides of the family) and my brother Scott. He's the only grandchild and she's the oldest of my uncle's kids.

We slept in reasonably late the next morning. I woke up before Carson did but didn't get up. When he woke up, he got super excited that it was Christmas and truly jumped out of bed, shouting "Merry Christmas!!"
My dad didn't hang my sister's stocking or my stocking this year because we no longer live in the house. We thought this was terrible,  but no one fixed it. Carson put his and my stockings up there on Christmas morning.

My brother got this tree from a farm he works at during the year.

 Real fireplaces are overrated when it's in the 60s during the day.

Tamales and fried eggs (tradition) and orange monkey bread for breakfast.

Before Becca and Thomas arrived, we opened our stockings. Carson and I waited until Christmas morning for that as well.

Proof that life revolves around Oscar the dog: new toothbrush for dad, tainted already.

Aaaaand he's nice to us, but please don't steal his spotlight.

We watched Peanuts Christmas after unwrapping.

I gave Carson the game Wits and Wagers for Christmas, and we introduced the family to it before Becca and Thomas showed up.

Once they arrived, we exchanged gifts. In Dad's gift, we included this pack of rubber balls for Oscar and Dad to play with. Oscar smelled them through the bag, waited until they were unwrapped, and carried the whole thing around, before chewing the package open and playing with them. Guess it was a successful gift.

Thomas and Becca got stockings that Mom made from an old sweater!

Becca got a piggy bank shaped like a dog, and we immediately let it take a nap with Mini.

Scott wrapped up jars of honey and presented them in a bed of pinestraw to his immediate family members.

After gifts were open, we let the mess linger while we enjoyed our gifts and got lunch ready.

Becca was excited about the pound of shea butter she received from Nana.

If you recall, Dad gave Mom a huge disco ball for her birthday. It was maybe a little too huge, so he purchased a second, smaller one. Now they have twice the light reflecting capabilities.

Our family doesn't have traditional Christmas lunch food. Christmas dinner has never been a thing to us, so we had hamburgers because we all loved having them on Sundays after church when we were growing up.

We haven't been to South Carolina for Christmas since I've known Carson, so this was the first year we got to participate in the annual gingerbread house making contest. I don't think it's a contest so much as it is an activity, but it got pretty creative. Here's Carson's and my house... the pavement is made from the included gingerbread men.

Thomas and Scott went for a very creative castle, complete with alligators in the moat.

Becca and Dad created more of a woodland hut, decorated with greenery.

Following the gingerbread creations, we got sleepy.

And then it was time for family pictures. I made that horrible rodent Scott is holding. More on that in the future.

I don't think this was posed, but I don't know what they were looking at.

This picture was Thomas' idea. The best picture of us yet.

We introduced Becca and Thomas to Wits and Wagers for a quick round before they had to leave to be with the Mole family. Afterwards, the rest of us got in the car to go to Granddaddy and Grandmama's house. Dad and I tested out the DVD player in the back that nobody uses anymore and lo and behold - Elf was in the player! So we watched most of it there and back.

This plane at the MCAS air station has been lit up like Rudolph every Christmas since I can remember. At Thanksgiving when we were here, the lights weren't on it yet and I was concerned that a budget cut or something meant that they wouldn't... guess they just wait until after Thanksgiving to decorate for Christmas too!

Christmas sunset on the downtown bridge

After Christmas dinner at Granddaddy and Grandmama's which wasn't traditional either due to the exchange of turkey for pork, we introduced Carson to fruitcake and ambrosia, which he'd never had but enjoyed. Those are not his fingers in the picture, in case you were worried.

We rifled through a box of Dad's old school pictures, ribbons, newspaper articles of his golf wins, report cards and various art projects after dinner, as well as a little Facebook stalking.

No aunts, uncles or cousins were there this year, just us, which didn't feel that strange, since I haven't exactly made it home for Christmas in forever, and since they're on a year-on, year-off Christmas schedule and my family is the only one that still lives in Beaufort. It was different thinking back to past Christmases there when we were little and could hardly wait to gulp down our food while sitting in the foyer, stealthily shaking boxes in hopes of new Barbies and Beanie Babies as we impatiently begged our slow parents to please finish eating so we could rip open presents. It was quiet this year at Grandmama's, but full of memories.

That's enough pictures for one post, right? More to come of our trip in another post.