Christmas 2012

We had a really fun and relaxing Christmas this year! Though it would have been great to spend the day with family, we still had a wonderful holiday and a great day off work. (I'm aware this is super detailed, but I love going back and reading these blogs to remember special events, so you'll have to bare with me through some of the mundane details...or not, you can skip to the pictures if you'd like.)

Sunday, we FaceTimed with Kory's family and got to see almost all of them together in Amarillo. It was especially fun to see Lucy in action and hear her giggle, since we mostly just see pictures of her. 

I worked all day Monday, and Kory spent his day working at our four Christmas Eve services at church. When I got off work, I went to church to help with the Children's Ministry at the 6:00 service and then attended the 8:00 service with our besties, Jeremy & Abby, and their families. 

After the last service, we headed home to begin Christmas festivities. Kory skipped and sang out of the church building...the man LOVES Christmas, probably more than I do, which is saying a LOT. We went home and opened our traditional Christmas eve pajamas and then decided to open another gift, just because we could! These are the benefits of being adults and getting to make your own rules for Christmas, without having to consult other family members :) 

With our Christmas pj's on, we settled in for the first viewing of A Christmas Story. Kory is crazy about that movie and I think we watched it a total of 5 times over that 24 hour period. I enjoy it, but mostly because it's fun to watch it with him. He can pretty much quote all of it, repeatedly says this next part is his favorite part in the whole movie and will start cracking up in anticipation of what will happen next.

We went to bed fairly early, but it turns out that only one of us really slept that night. Part of Kory really loving Christmas means that he can't sleep the night before...just like a little kid. He tried so hard this year, but ended up only getting about 3 hours of sleep that night I think. He waited as long as he could before waking me up to start opening presents, which I think was about 7:30 or so.

It was raining really hard outside and the sun hadn't really come out yet, so we started a fire in the fireplace and opened our stockings and gifts. 

We discovered this year that it's really hard to keep gifts a secret when you're married, but it's also really fun to receive gifts from a spouse because they know you SO well and can get you gifts you didn't even know you needed or wanted. 

One of my favorite stocking presents was a book written by the founder of TOMS shoe company, Blake Mycoskie. It's called Start Something That Matters and tells the TOMS story from the beginning, but also shares ideas and inspiration for how to live a life of making a difference in your world. After opening all our gifts, I decided to read a few pages of my book. I ended up falling asleep reading my book and took a morning nap. I must say, any day where I get to take a nap (and stay in my pajamas until lunch time) is sure to be one of my favorite days. 

Sky got a rubber tire chew toy from Santa, but he obviously got confused and thought it was his Christmas dinner :) 

Kory also decided to take a nap since hadn't really slept much the night before, so I read my book and caught up on my DVR'd shows that he doesn't like to watch with me. About 1:00, we finally decided to get up and around and get dressed for the day.

We went to join several families from our church for the rest of the day. They are a group of people who don't have family in Oregon and call themselves "The Orphans" :) It's great to have friends who understand our situation and welcome us like family for the holidays. We played several games and ate dinner together and then tried to go see Les Miserables, but it was sold out, so we returned to the Burmeister's house to watch movies instead. 

When we got home that night, we were able to FaceTime with my parents and share a little bit of Christmas with them. I went back to work the day after Christmas, but Kory had the whole week off. It was SO nice to come home to a clean house and home-cooked meals each day! 

I'm still working on taking all of our Christmas decorations down and putting the gifts away. Hopefully they'll all be down by this weekend.