Holiday Hoopla

Last weekend officially kicked our the holidays festivities. Friday, my magazine staff went out for a nice late lunch and exchanged gifts. Each year, we do a Crafty Christmas gift swap, and everyone has to make gifts for the other 5 staffers. Kevin and I made 4 kinds of cookies (iced gingerbread snowflakes, holiday biscotti, florentines and Gran's russian tea cakes), which we also gave to our neighbors. Megan gave us mint and rhubarb liquor, which she'd been working on since late summer. Tricia made us little purses/totes featuring pretty iron-on photos she'd taken herself. Carmen made yummy chocolate-amaretto and chocolate-peanut butter cupcakes. Susan made her Aunt Iome's famous iced sugar cookies, plus very hip home handmade thank-you notes. And last-but-not-least, Bryn made Take-Five cookie bars and raspberry squares. It's always so fun to see what everyone makes each year and even how we package everything! After lunch, we went ice-skating at Fountain Square downtown, where a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter interviewed us about skating when it was 60 degrees outside. My quote made it into Saturday's paper, LOL.

Saturday, Matt and Amanda came over for our annual Christmas dinner and gift swap. We take turns hosting it each year, and we try to put together something special for dinner and drinks. This year, we made sushi rolls together, which was a lot of fun. And of course, we served more of those cookies for dessert! It's always so much fun exchanging gifts with Matt and Amanda because we go all out. We also usually celebrate New Year's Eve at the house that didn't host Christmas, so we'll be heading over there to ring in 2007.

Sunday, Katie, Matt, Mom, Michael Seth, Joslyn (Seth's girlfriend), Gran, Kevin and I went to see the Covedale Center for the Performing Arts' production of "A Christmas Carol." The couple next door are the director and choreographer for the theater, so it was fun to go check out their great work. Afterward, we kept it simple and picked up LaRosa's pizza then had our family gift exchange (and more cookies). It was a nice day, and we enjoyed meeting Joslyn. Seth seems so grown up!

This week has been pretty low-key since we had almost all of our shopping, decorating, cleaning, baking and wrapping done by last weekend. I had a work holiday today, so I get an extra long weekend. We'll see my mom and Seth Christmas Eve, then we'll go to the Carusos holiday open house on Christmas day. I also bought all the fixins for a gourmet Christmas dinner today. We'll both go back to work Tuesday, then head up to Edgerton on Wednesday for more festivities with Kevin's family.