Happy Holidays!

I was going to wish you all a happy holidays before Christmas, but then wanted to be able to share with you what our Christmas had been like. And I didn't want to bombard you with holiday posts.

Our tree Christmas morning.

We started celebrating Christmas with my parents and siblings on the 23rd. My dad prepared an amazing meal of prime rib, mashed taters, salad, broccoli. Yum. Then we opened presents at my parents house on the 24th and Miss Moira made out like a bandit. And she was totally into opening presents this year. Once she realized that there was good stuff within all those bags and boxes. And of course she proceeded to help me unwrap several of my gifts too :) One tradition we have is that my mom makes everyone Christmas Eve pajamas. It's a tradition that her mom used to do and my mom has always done it with us. This year my mom made NINE pairs of jammies because in addition to us five kids, there are three significant others and one grandkiddo.

Moira in her Christmas jammies.

We followed up an afternoon of presents with nap time (for Moira) and a huge dinner of homemade tamales. This was my first time making true tamales (I have always used a fake-out recipe until just a few days ago). They were so much easier than I could have imagined! The only problem?? They have to steam cook for 2 hours and my pan only held 10 :(  These tamales will definitely be Christmas Eve a tradition in our house, but I will have to make them much more often than once a year!

Tamale dinner. Can't wait to make these again to share with you guys!

After dinner, we put the kiddo to bed (in her new jammies of course), and almost finished up the miscellaneous wrapping and gift assembly we had. We actually finished the rest first thing in the morning. Moira sleeps until 10:30am-11:00am, so we had some time to do that. Once she woke up, we showed her part of the things that Santa brought her (some presents he wraps, some he displays to be seen immediately).

Moira's grocery store from Santa.

Going shopping!

Onto breakfast before we dug into all of the presents at our house! Baked pesto eggs and potatoes and apple cinnamon cranberry baked oatmeal. Both were hits that I will definitely be putting on the blog soon! After breakfast there was a 3 hour festival of gift unwrapping. Then a trip back to my mom's house to pick up Santa gifts there. And back home for a nap.

All dressed up in her new jewelry.

During nap I was all about getting the huge pile of gift wrap gone through and sorted (what to keep for next year, what was recyclable, and what was trash). Followed by dinner of chicken fried steak, mashed taters, country gravy, biscuits, salad, green bean casserole, and some amazing sweet potatoes that Adam's aunt made (so yummy!). Adam's mom told me that I "ruined yet another restaurant meal". Which I take as pretty high praise :)

So, anyways... Happy Holidays to you and your family (no matter what you celebrate). May it be filled with family, love, and good food :)