Christmas Season 2012

Rob and I had our first wedding on 2 December 2006 and we seem to begin our Christmas celebrations every year with our Anniversary, which makes for a very long but very merry Christmas season. It's probably lazy, but instead of writing individual posts for all the interesting events that went on over Christmas and the New Year, I've decided to simply combine them all into one post. So here goes...

We celebrated our Anniversary by decorating the house for Christmas and getting our Christmas cards written. Part of this decoration including our Anniversary gift to ourselves, a new TV stand! It's amazing how much more space we have in the room and how much more STORAGE we have! We've only add three small drawers and shelves with this unit but it has made such a difference to the amount of storage we have for entertainment!

Our living room all dolled up for
Christmas and our new TV stand! 

The weekend after our anniversary we thought we should get some good use out of the new living room and decided to host a Christmas Movie night. This was really only in part to show off the new TV stand, my friend Gillian and I had actually planned it well before we even looked at TV stands as a day where we could watch our favorite Christmas movies without having our cynical husbands roll their eyes the whole time. However, we failed and the day ended up including our cynical husbands and also our friend Bex who had, up until that day, avoided pretty much all Christmas movies!

We made egg nog (or something like it) and hot chocolate, baked and decorated gingerbread and ate a lot of chocolate and popcorn while we watched Christmas Vacation, Home Alone, A Christmas Story and Nativity!. It was a fun and relaxing day which really kicked off our Christmas nicely!

Our gingerbread guests!

Bex, Gillian and me with our gingerbread creations!

Rob with his cookies!

My 'pinterest' like cookies!

I ended up creating another much larger batch of gingerbread for Save the Chidren's (my work) Christmas Jumper Day the following week. You can see pictures on my recipe for Gingerbread post. I made over 50 gingerbread men and stars for my team which were decorated with Christmas jumpers and Santa hats. It was a great way to buy friends my first week at a new job! 

After all the excitement of starting a new job and Christmas related events, I was really looking forward to our low-key Christmas with Rob's mother, step-father and cousins in East Grinstead. There were six of us, no children and we spent five days around Christmas doing nothing but eating, drinking and playing games. On Christmas Day we spoke with family all over the world and at one point had a Skype chat with people in the UK, Germany, Australia and Thailand! I was given a beautiful painting of hyacinths from Rob's mother and a Kermit the frog hat from my mum (which, if you know my love of the Muppets is the perfect gift). Rob received a huge stainless steel pot which we desperately needed to make soups and large batches of pasta! All-in-all it was a fantastic Christmas but very glutinous and I've been trying to work off all the weight ever since! 

The cute English fireplace I sat next
to for five days of Christmas fun! 

Our Christmas eve meal of Salmon in puff pastry
and other assorted salad and seafood! 

Everyone enjoying Christmas Eve!
Amy, Lee, Will, Sue and Rob 

Too much Christmas! Me with my Kermit Hat
and shirt trying to digest all the lovely food! 

We had a very calm few days between Christmas and new year, where we went to dinner with friends from my old work and watched lots of TV. On 29 December, bang on schedule, we welcomed our new nephew Felix Clark into the family. He smashed the previous birth weight record held by Rob entering the world at nearly 10lbs! I've written more about when we visited them late in January but this was our first photo of him and it really rounded off the already amazing 2012 year nicely. 

Felix Clark, our nephew! 

I would love to tell you about our New Year's but unfortunately Rob and I acted much younger than we are and drank far to much to remember anything... as such I will just say that we started 2013 off with a clean slate and nothing but fond memories for 2012 :) 

Happy New Year everyone!