Christmas shenanigans

This is how we do it.

Celebrate the Christmas season.

Get a tree, usually right after Thanksgiving (check).

                                                    

Play a variety of games (check) 

Here we are playing dreidel for the first time.  Wyatt has been asking to play since he learned how in Kindergarten.  It has taken me five years to find chocolate gold coins and actually play.  As we were playing this round, I learned (via Wikipedia) that you can play with anything: pennies, candy...even raisins.  Adell learned about the dreidel game in Kindergarten from a Jewish classmate.

                                                   

Deliver 12 Days of Christmas stuff to our Secret Santa families (check x 12)

                                                   

Make gingerbread houses (check)

Every other year I make real gingerbread or use gram crackers.  This year I made gingerbread...and just like the other years I made it...this year I swore (with real swear words) that I would never do it again.  It is so much work.

                                                    

Participate in the nativity and have an awesome Christmas eve party with Dave and Angela's family (double check)

                                  

Do the Christmas day thing (check)

                                                    

                                                    

Enjoy the wonder of Christmas and feel the love and joy in our family (check--a million times check)

                                                    

The one time a year I dress up to make small talk.

Ah, the annual work holiday party.  Yeesh, this thing gives me a whopping case of the stress outs.  I usually have to secure the babysitter, find something appropriate to wear, get myself looking presentable and get myself over to the party location.  THEN I get to spend a couple of hours making small talk and feeling like a jerk when I cannot remember who I've met previously and who I haven't.

Basically, it is awesome.  

Will gives a great run down of how the company is doing.  I always like hearing that.  However, this past year has been full of more challenges than successes so I wasn't super psyched to hear the speech this year.  He still did a great job with the speech and hopefully 2016 will be full of more successes than challenges.

                                             

After Will gives his speech there is usually a few fun games and white elephant style gift exchanges led by Dave.  One of the games was to pass your phone around the table and take a selfie with everyone's phone.  These were the pictures on my phone:

   

You can see, we sat with some awesome people.

We did some more small talk and then danced for a while.  It was a lovely party.