Friends Annual Xmas Party The last ten days have been full of fun and festive Christmas events and activities.  The season kicked off with our annual friends' holiday party.  Jill hosted this year in her new home and it was fabulous.  I love the opportunity to catch up with friends (some of whom we rarely see) and always love coming home with fun new ornaments.   This year's group photo is a bit comical as it appears that Jill sprouted reindeer antlers!

A few nights later we celebrated the season at the Skoll holiday party.  This year it was held in Redwood City and just happened to have Our Gingerbread Manor occurred on the same night as "Stormageddon".  Fortunately the rain didn't deter too many people, although it was a very wet night.  A fun one too.  The following night was our church Christmas party and then Saturday night we drove to the city of our annual gingerbread house decorating with Joy and Collin.

 We typically go all out with our gingerbread houses, but this year after sweet little Mila arrived, we decided to scale it back.   We only did one house, I didn't make any landscaping gingerbread (trees, reindeer, men), This year's masterpiece and we didn't buy any new candy  (we limited ourselves to the 15 lb box of candy leftovers we add to each year).   We did try out a gingerbread manor instead of a house and Ay, who was visiting her little niece really stepped up the decorating game.  Her dogs turned reindeer on the roof are the best.   We had a lovely night with the fam and were happy to have pulled off decorating gingerbread houses yet again.

This Christmas season we also decided to try something new. After being in Fremont for almost 5 years now, we are finally feeling a bit more established and that we have a group of friends we can do things with.  We decided we would invite several families over to our house to decorate sugar cookies.  I spent most of Sunday afternoon making close to 200 sugar cookies.  Calm before the storm And boy do I love my kitchen island and that it facilitated that amount of baking and still had room to spare!   Monday night 10 families, around 40 people (21 of them kids) joined us for cookie decorating chaos.  We managed to fit everyone in our kitchen who wanted to decorate, the little kids played in the "fun room" and we even had Charlie Brown's Christmas for kids to watch when they tired of cookies.   The entire night was a hit!  We were even The masses surprised by how little frosting escaped out of the kitchen.  Clean up was easier than expected.   We may even do it again!

We've had a great start to Christmas and can't wait to spend a few days with family! Pictures of our California Xmas are here.