Merry Christmas!

After Thanksgiving, we quickly transitioned into Christmas!

The girls took part of a caroling troupe again, through the community theater group that they are part of.  They performed in various venues, including an old folks' home, who really appreciated seeing young people singing Christmas songs.

The carolers also performed in downtown Vancouver at the tree lighting ceremony.  

We stayed to watch the tree light up.    It was pretty cool.

 

It was time to string up Christmas lights in front of our house and Karina was very helpful with that, as usual.  

The weekend before Christmas, we hosted a Christmas get together at our home for our neighbors, just like that year.  For various reasons, many of our neighbors could not come and it ended up that we had only two families show up.  

We did have lots of food though.

Leading up to Christmas, we broke out the card games and played a bunch.  This one is called Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza and the kids like it a lot.  It requires quick thinking and Eliana excels at it.

We also played Pit, which requires people to trade cards in a speedy manner.

We also hosted a little gingerbread (actually graham cracker) house building party.  We bought about 3 pounds of candy to decorate but actually what people spent the most time doing was constructing the house.  The kids went through two family sized packs of graham crackers and still ran out!

Xiao's house was 3-stories high and very neatly decorated.

Karina's house was two stories and had a front porch and a balcony.

Gabe's house was...interesting.

Eliana's house was also very cute and sported a tiled roof and wreath on the front.

And then it was time to decorate the house.  The kids were really into this and Gabe started by hanging the stockings.

There's a little tree that the girls like to also decorate and have in their room.

Then we went off to pick out a tree at the lot.  It was rainy so they were encouraged to be quick about it.

We got one and Lucky helped supervise.

Once in our house, the lights went on.

Then goes the garland.

Gabe was disappointed that the tree lot people did not wrap our tree in netting before tying it on to our van.  But he was happy to find the netting from LAST year's tree in the boxes with the decorations.  For some reason, he loves playing with it.

The decorations went on.  Every kid has their own box of ornaments that they've accumulated over the years.

Even Mommy has a box, with some ornaments that are decades old.

And on goes the star, which is a big honor to put on.  

On Christmas Eve, we visited Emily's dad, brought him a calendar filled with family pictures as a gift and some Christmas cookies.  

And then we went to a Christmas Eve service at a church.  The service ended with singing carols by candle light.

After the service, we drove around town to look at the houses that go overboard in decorating with lights.

And then after the kids were in bed, Santa visited our house to stuff the kids' stockings full of presents.

Eliana did leave a plate of cookies out for Santa.

But Elvin removed the cookies because we knew that Lucky would come before Santa found them.  Lucky also likes milk.

The kids were asking when they could open the stockings and we told them they were NOT allowed to wake us up before 7:30am.  And at that time, the mayhem started.

The kids got various trinkets, small Lego sets, an alarm clock, candy, an insulated water bottle, and other toys, in their stockings.  

Karina was happy with the slinky she got.

She also got a big insulated mug with a handle.  She loves this and has stayed very well hydrated.

Xiao Yu got a little water color set.

And then after breakfast, the present opening began in earnest.   Eliana got some stuffed animals and a larger Lego set.  She is into Legos again.

Her present from Gabe was his leftover chocolate from his advent calendar that he did not consume during the month of December.  

Eliana also got some cool make up she's been wanting.

The big surprise for the girls was a trip to Disneyland.  They were very excited and leave on January 11 for Anaheim.  Their aunt and girl cousin from Denver will meet them there.

They also each got $100 to spend in Disney.

Gabe got a voucher to go to any restaurant of his choice.  He is turning into a foodie.

He also requested and got a drone with has a camera and quite a long range.

Here he is flying it.

Later on, here he is sporting his blue bathrobe, which he also got for Christmas.

He also got a cookbook from a chef that he follows on YouTube.

Here is his tower of gifts, including a t-shirt and more books.

Also, each kid got tickets to see the live performance of the Kratt brothers from the Wild Kratts TV show, which is a show on PBS about animals.  We'll be watching this at the Keller Auditorium in Portland.

Lucky also got a present.  He got a blanket and we also stuffed a piece of chicken jerky dog treat in there, which he found.

He likes his blankie.

Here is Karina's loot all laid out neatly and organized.

Xiao got one of those games where you fish for the little plastic fish whose mouths open and close.

He also got a Tonie box, which is an electronic box that plays music or narrates various stories when you put a figurine on top of it.  He has a Toy Story figurine that plays Toy Story music, one from the movie Cars, and others.

Eliana got him a couple pairs of glasses (that filter out blue light.)  He's always wanted to wear glasses again and now he can.

And Xiao got a bubble machine gun which he enjoys out in the backyard.

During Christmas day, we also opened up a sample box of caramels from Trader Joes.  It has a dozen different types and you can try to see if you can figure out which is which flavor by tasting it.

For dinner, we had a small gathering with just Emily's sister and our niece who drove down from Seattle.  We had steak, and biscuits, and also Elvin made pakoras, which is an Indian deep fried ball of vegetables in chickpea flour batter.  Everyone likes them.

For Christmas dinner, Lucky got some steak mixed in to his normal dog food (which he hates and won't eat unless something else is mixed in.)

The next day, we worked taking down the christmas tree and putting away the decorations, because the plan was to fly to California the following day to visit Elvin's family.  Here is Gabe being "helpful" by lowering the tree down with a karate belt, of all things.

And then...because Eliana had a sore throat, Elvin decided to test her for COVID just as a precaution.  It turned out it came out positive!  So he tested her again just to make sure it wasn't a fluke and the second test was positive as well.  

So we ended up cancelling our trip and turning our week into a quarantine-style staycation.

The kids were disappointed but we tried to make the best out of the rest of the week.

We played a few games of Rummikub.

We also had lots of take out to the places that the kids wanted to eat at.  Gabe requested birria tacos from El Viejon, which is a local food truck with excellent food and home made corn tortillas.

We had extra gingerbread house decorating kits and the kids wanted to do that, while some of us watched the Great British Baking Show Holiday Edition.  Everyone agreed that we don't like the new hosts as much as the original ones from years ago.

Here is Karina's...

Eliana has gotten quite expert as decorating these things...

This is hers...

Here's a close up shot.

Emily's brother gifted us his old Xbox 360, but it didn't have a working power supply.  So Eliana got Gabe a power supply for Christmas and the kids played hours and hours on this.  It has a Kinect attachment which detects your body's movements.  This let the kids play games where you dance along with the video and it scores you on your accuracy.  They ended up burning lots of calories that week doing this!

We also went out to get ShareTea.

Eliana requested sushi so we went to a food cart pod in Portland to get that.

Xiao You wanted Sonic so that was one dinner.  Karina wanted Jamba Juice so we got that as well.  Elvin ordered a large protein drink from Jamba, and also had a small chicken sandwich from Sonic and then ended up eating half of Emily's hamburger which she did not like.  And then he decided to check how many grams of protein was in his drink...which was 51 grams, or the equivalent of eating about 8 eggs!  Needless to say, he felt very full for the rest of the night.

One of Karina's presents was a shave ice maker attachment that hooks on to our Kitchen Aid mixer.  She made a bowl of shave ice starting on Christmas night and had more every single night of the week.

It works pretty well.

Lots of shave ice was consumed that week.

And this was mixed in with lots of watching videos.  And that's how we spent our Christmas and the subsequent staycation.

We had a good Christmas and hope you did as well!

P.S.  It's day 10 after Eliana first got COVID, and somehow, miraculously, none of the rest of us have gotten sick...