Christmas-y weekend!

A little group of us got together yesterday at my cousin, Debee's house and had our Christmas family party.  We have a long way to go to get back to Hall Christmases of yesterday, when the entire family got together on Christmas Eve at Maw's and we opened gifts and ate and laughed and then hurried home to jump in bed so Santa Claus could come.  We all lived in the same county and it was much easier then.  Now we're all scattered to the winds and it's hard to get back.  But we're working on it.

Bless Debee's heart, she'd just had surgery two days before but she still wanted us there.  We had a wonderful time!  Yummy food, lots of laughs and tons of love.  Maw was smiling down on us for sure.

 

Debee puts up three beautiful trees every year!  Here are just a few of her many ornaments on her Georgia Bulldog tree.

Instead of exchanging gifts every year, we do an ornament swap and it's so much fun.  Everybody brings one, everybody gets one.  We started with the youngest to the oldest this year.  Everybody gets up, goes up to the tree and chooses a gift.  I got a most appropriate orange tabby kitty ornament and Larry got a Santa cowboy.  We loved 'em!  Ami took this picture of us as Larry was coming back to his chair.

 

When we left, we went antiquing with Ami and Brian at the antique shops in nearby Bolingbroke.  I was in Vintage Santa Heaven at this store!  I actually hollered when I saw this little section.  Ami got to it first and tried to tell me to move on, there was nothing to see there.  Ha! 

 I ended up getting this sweet little Santa...

  
And this little angel with the broken hand.  None of us are perfect, right?

(Update:  I have found out that she used to hold two gold bells and they are what has broken off.  She's a Lefton 1950's spaghetti trim Christmas angel and was in a set of three.  Google is a wunnerful thang!) 

We got up really early this morning, had cups of hot chocolate in the hot tub and this afternoon, I took a long nap with Banjo and Tabbie Hoffman at my side while Larry cleaned up the house and did the laundry.  I made a couple of Christmas presents, made another pan of peanut butter fudge and some white chocolate cinnamon-sugar pretzels to fill tins for our neighbors and for the lady who brings our mail.  We watched an amazing Christmas movie called Lost Christmas, a beautiful story of pain and loss and love and second chances.  If you haven't seen it, you should.  It might become a Christmas tradition!

We separated our gifts into piles of which ones are going where and had hummus and crackers and cheese (and peanut butter fudge!) for supper.

Last weekend before the big day!  I was oh so happy to be snuggly warm in my little house with my love and our furbabies and not out there in the crazy shopping my feet off!  Four days left!!