Christmas in Austin

This year, we convinced Josh's family to come to Austin for Christmas! The weekend before Christmas we made a day trip to Houston for my family's Christmas with my two older sisters, their husbands, kids, and my parents. We had a great time driving in just for the day to celebrate--especially since we didn't have to split our time between our two families! Mitch and Kate (the oldest grandkids) got to play Santa and hand out all the gifts then all the kids were able to rip into their gifts at once! It's mass chaos when it happens but is a great sight to watch! Did I mention there were 8 kids from ages 2-10 there? We had a delicious dinner catered by one of my mom's clients, watched the kids have sword fights (no idea why my mom bought them all wooden swords..but they loved it!), and each adult received a stocking full of swizzle sticks! It's a family thing...my Grandpa traveled a lot and collected swizzle sticks. My mom said she was giving us our inheritance. Oh! We also got to raid my dad's garage to take home stuff that was his dad's!

We started off our Christmas celebration in Austin by going over to our neighbor's house, having dinner, then driving down to Zilker to spin under the Zilker tree. Our neighbors have kids fairly close to our children's ages and everyone seems to get along well. After finding parking (what a zoo!) and finding each other in the crowd (unlike me, Lydia is not attached at the hip to her cell phone so we had to locate each other old school style...by walking around!), we had fun spinning under the tree while telling the kids to stop running into others. We then walked over to Zilker Hillside where they had the stage decorated with stuff that used to be used on the Zilker trail of lights and a good tejano band was playing. I think Lydia and Hector (the neighbors) knew who the band was, but Josh and I had no clue. It was fun listening to the music while the kids rolled down the hill...again with us telling them to not roll into others! :-) Both Adeline and Santiago (Lydia and Hector's son) are in the dual language program at their school so I wasn't surpirsed when Adeline announced, "Hey! I know this song!".

The next event we had planned was Christmas Eve...church going! We went to a service geared towards kids. It was an interesting service....all of the adults thought it could have been focused on the birth of Jesus a little more, but the kids seemed to like all the skits with elves and toys dancing around. So, we came home--sprinkled our reindeer food on the lawn, drank some hot chocolate, put out cookies and soy milk for Santa, bid Buddy farewell, and tucked the kids into bed. BTW....in our house Santa has dairy issues and our Elf of the Shelf is named Buddy (after the movie Elf with Will Ferrell). Then my Mother-in-law, Nancy, and I got to work on wrapping all the presents. Presents do NOT appear under our tree until the kids are asleep. Even the ones that are from Mom and Dad. And everything gets wrapped. When I was growing up, our presents from Santa weren't ever wrapped. But now as an adult....Santa uses a specific wrapping paper for each child then Mom and Dad presents are wrapped with different paper.

Christmas morning was great! We had breakfast casserole--eggs courtesy of our chickens--and cinnamon rolls while we opened presents with the girls. Then Aunt Brandy and Aunt Courtney (Josh's sister and her partner)came and there was MORE present opening!! While the girls and Josh rested, Bill (my father-in-law) and I got to work on Christmas dinner! We made roast chicken, roasted a bunch of root vegetables--that we got from the Farmer's Market--, steamed green beans, and burnt the rolls! For dessert we had cheesecake, chocolate pie, and oatmeal cookies. I chose to do the prayer before we ate and I decided to show Linus's speech from the Charlie Brown Christmas movie. It's the one where he tells what Christmas is really all about. My dad always used to read from the bible, but I didn't think the girls would be able to sit through that. I did, however, want to remind them that Christmas is not about getting gifts!
After we had stuffed ourselves, we drove over to 37th street and Guadalupe. We parked the car and walked down 37th street and a couple of the surrounding streets. Josh and I sounded old by saying, "Man, this used the be a LOT crazier when we were in college." We realized that was 10 years ago and things do change. 37th street is still worth seeing, I think. But you definitely need to walk down the street. Driving down wouldn't do it justice!

I think everyone had fun at our Austin Christmas....it was stressful at times, but that's the norm. I was glad to be in my house on Christmas day with my girls and my husband. Maybe we'll get to do it again sometime!
Feliz Navidad!