Christmas cheer

Christmas has come and gone for good old 2008 and i must say it was a great year. much like thanksgiving, this was an especially cool Christmas since this time last year i was dinking around in iraq wishing i was with my family and friends back in oregon.

andrea and i spent our our holiday time trying to blend family traditions while also looking for ways to create new ones for our family. it only seems right to start with the tree. some of my favorite memories of Christmas growing up involve driving out into the countryside, picking out a nice tree, cutting it down ourselves and hauling it home. none of that fake plastic tree stuff around here. however, i must say... i like the idea of a potted tree that you bring into the house in December to avoid cutting so many trees down and hearing them scream the whole way home. this year though, we went out toward stayton/sublimity and got our tree from a friend (ruthless) who works on a tree farm out that way. it was very fun, and stella even "helped" pick out the tree.

the whites threw an "ugly sweater" party, which was both fun and hilarious. photos of that are here.

then it was time to decorate and switch out our music. i made a deal with andrea that we couldn't play Christmas songs until december 1st. all those years of working in theaters or walmart has me still a bit burned out on holiday tunes. so we decorated the whole house with tidings of joy and to top it off... i was able to bring one of my traditions of putting kermit on the tree.

after everything was decorated it was time to get some presents under the tree. while andrea already had most of my presents done... i was on crunch time to find her gifts. i'm a procrastinator through and through.

to make even harder to get out and pick up those last minute gifts... our "arctic blast" (the storm over sensationalized by all the local media) hit and we had to become homebodies for a few days. it definitely was an inconvenience, but i still thought it was fun. i like "roughing" it every once in a while. i know some people hated it for various reasons (cabin fever being number 1) but it is what it is and Christmas isn't about getting out and doing things anyway so arctic blast be damned, Christmas will prevail. sometimes it seems like it should be called presentmas or complain-about-my-life-even-though-it's-better-than-most-other-people's-around-the-world-mas. just go to the cia world factbook site and look at countries like laos. it's hard to be troubled by power-outages when you see there are people living every day without electricity.

to top off the holidays, we took a trip to eugene to see andrea's family. we spent Christmas day and the following day hanging out with the comptons and glaziers down there. many a card game was played as well as a bit of wii. we followed it up with seeing my folks on saturday for another holiday bash. good times all around.

merry Christmas everyone.