Christmas

 Its been a quiet and peaceful Christmas for Beanie and I.  

Beanie had a great day :-) 

I, on the other hand, could not help but think of the thousands of people spending Christmas without loved ones due to COVID or struggling to make ends meet. Its a sad year for the country and world, and one can only count one's blessing which is what we did today.

Our family decided to not meet to celebrate Christmas. My niece and nephew could not travel anyway.  We are pretty strict about social distancing. Whenever we have met - birthday's, Thanksgiving -  its been outdoors in my sister's backyard which has been very enjoyable. Now that its getting too cold, we decided to do our own thing. We met my Mom a couple of times during the day yesterday.

I did not take time off from work this week. I had the 24th and 25th off.  I finished work early on Wed. and since the weather was nice I took Beanie for a  bike ride, while I walked along. Beanie and I baked cookies and later we got takeout for dinner and ate while watching the Grinch movie.

Yesterday was cold and rainy, so we stayed in. I allowed Beanie to open my Christmas gift early - a Frozen Lego castle - which kept her busy for a few hours, and allowed me to catch up on some bills, etc. Around 4pm we got some dinner - turkey and Beanie's favorite Mac and cheese. I began cooking some roasted veggies while Beanie set the dinner table.  We sat down for a nice "feast" which was really enjoyable. Later Beanie unwrapped her presents from me, my Mom, sis, friends, neighbors etc. We did a video chat with my Mom and she enjoyed watching Beanie open her presents. Beanie set up cookies and milk for Santa and was in bed promptly at 8:30pm so as to not interfere with Santa's arrival.

Santa came at night and brought Beanie her gift - an LOL Glamper. 

I heard Beanie wake around 5am and hoped she was not up for the day! Thankfully she went back to sleep.

This morning she was thrilled to see her present and while she payed I set up a nice brunch for us. We spent the rest of that day playing with her Glamper.  I bought her a Junior Monopoly game, among other things, so we played it and she loved it so much that we played it most of the day. Ended the evening quite late tonight as we were watching the movie Elf.

She was out like a light by 10:15pm!

Hope you all had a blessed and peaceful Christmas.

This is our first attempt at baking cookies. The shapes did not come out well. Our second baking session yesterday was much better.

We did Elf on a Shelf this year too.  Here is our daredevil Elf riding a hanging reindeer decoration. 

Santa's gift. Its unwrapped because Beanie is getting wise and noticed last year that Santa's gift used the same wrapping paper we had - ugh!

Stockings. We added one for Coral our cat. Again stockings were tough this year. Beanie is home all the times so I cannot go to a store (nor do I want to). She sees all the boxes coming in, so she knew it was from me. I told her its usually a combination from me and Santa but it was just me this year because Santa was very busy due to COVID.

Brunch!