Holiday Re-cap!

This year marked the very first Christmas Mike & I spent together as a married couple.  It was an incredible experience to have, just the two of us to celebrate the holiday!  We had a lot of fun bringing together our traditions and creating new ones...  The whole month of December was filled with conversations on Christmases we had growing up and what we did with our families.

One Christmastime tradition we will definitely keep is making gingerbread houses!  We made these last year with Skitz and Emilie, but Mike was high on morphine at the time so his building skills were highly impaired...

This year was much better!

Another fun & new tradition I decided to do was FUDGE!  My friend Emilie's mom makes fudge every year that is sooooo yummy, and around December I always get real excited for it!  Unfortunately, I was not home to partake of the goodness, so I decided to make my own!  I branched out and made a cookie dough fudge... The consistency was not quite right but it was still pretty tasty!

I decided to get especially crafty (thanks, pinterest...) and do a couple sewing projects for my parents Christmas gifts!  All us kids went in on a kindle for my Mom, so I decided to attempt sewing a case for it!  This is the finished product...

For my Dad I decided to make this remote control holding pillow... I also stuffed the pocket with macadamia nuts, for a nice Hawaiian touch...  I can't find the photo, but you get the idea.

We also spent sometime walking around downtown Waikiki and enjoying all the Christmas decorations!

The Friday before Christmas we ventured into Honolulu to see the city lights.  They had some fun displays.  We got hot cocoa and pretended like we were cold so we could get more into the whole experience.  :D

Gotta love the creepy doll in the background!

My favorite was the surfing snowman! 

On Christmas Eve we opened up our stockings and our presents... because we could.  And neither of us wanted to wait.  Okay, well mostly I didn't want to wait.  Haha!  Then we read the Christmas story from the bible.  

Christmas Day we lounged around and did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.  It was so wonderful.  

Finally we decided we would go to the beach and spend a nice relaxing day there...  We took some sushi and had a picnic on our rockin new beach mat!  We just laid in the sun and watched the waves roll in.  

This was the sunset on the drive home!!  Beautiful. 

It was just about the best Christmas ever!  After Christmas it seemed like New Years was here in the blink of an eye!  We spent New Years at our house watching a movie... Once 11:00 rolled around we meandered down to the beach to watch some fireworks.  We went out on this jetty and there were waves crashing around us as the fireworks went off to celebrate the arrival of the New Year!  It was very romantic.  Can't wait for the great events of 2012!