It's never too late for Christmas....Part 1.

How in the world did I get so far behind in blogging???

It just occurred to me the other day that I had posted barely any Christmas pictures! At this point, there are just far too many to put into one entire blog post, so I will do this in parts! (I think my bedroom at home will have to be 1 post itself!) I hope you enjoy some of our Christmas festivities of the year :)

The first weekend in December, there is a Christmas tree lighting and Christmas party at Dad's work. It's always a lot of fun! :) Here's a picture of Auntie Sherrie, me and the one and only Santa Claus!!!!


When I came back to school from Christmas break, I brought back pretty much only Christmas movies (with the exception of The Proposal and Grumpier Old Men).


There is this great t-shirt place in downtown Farmville (sorry, that just sounds funny to write.), called Pairets. You walk in there and there is literally an entire wall lined with solid color t-shirts in every possible color you can think of! They also have hoodies, regular sweat shirts, long-sleeved t-shirts, shorts, and more! Then, they have a wall of logos that you can get put onto a shirt. For Christmas of 2009 they created 2 special holiday logos for shirts and of COURSE, I loved them! They made another one for Christmas 2010, so I bought one for myself, and surprised Mom and Abby with their own for Christmas! :)

(*Sidenote: Pairets is EXTREMELY reasonably priced, and a lot of their stuff is better than what you can find in the bookstore. Maybe it's because you can personalize your shirt anyway you want it!)

And here are the Christmas lights I had hanging in my room. I have to thank Matt for hanging them up nicely because it looked a hot mess when I first did it! haha

Sometime earlier in 2010, Matt and I talked about making Rice Krispy Treat Gingerbread Houses for Christmas. So, we, along with Abby experimented. The three of us went to Food Lion and raided the candy aisle and bought several boxes of Rice Krispies. haha. Here's our interesting experimentation.....

We made a TON of sheets of Rice Krispies, because we each needed to make 6 squares: 4 for walls, and 2 for the roof.

Plenty of icing to lick off fingers.....

Here's my house!

Abby's house!

I loved Abby's crushed-up Candy Cane sidewalk. And how CUTE is her chocolate window with swags??

Matt's house with Hershey bar sidewalk...

So here are our finished houses. It's really funny because with the addition of some toothpicks, the walls stood up fine. The problem? The roof!! We had such a hard time getting the Rice Krispy to cooperate to build a roof! How did we solve the problem? In 1 of 3 ways:

1) Take the batch of Rice Krispys that burned and roll into 3 large Rice Balls. They will be ROCK HARD. Stick inside of house to support roof.

*ALERT: When Rice Krispies settle, they will take the formation of whatever is underneath it!!!

2) Stand an empty water bottle inside the house and use toothpics to connect on the edges.

3) Use however many toothpicks you think necessary. This can be anywhere from 15-30. Your decision.


So, needless to say, the Rice Krispy Treat Houses didn't turn out as we had planned. BUT, we did have a lot of fun making them and spending most of the time laughing at how the roofs were settling. Dad decided that they look more like Whoville Houses, sooooo that's just what they were! haha

I'm so glad that The Jefferson leaves their Christmas decorations up past Christmas. Christmastime just gets soo busy so it's hard to find a good time to go and see all of the BEAUTIFUL decorations. About a week into January, my last weekend home before coming back to Longwood, Mom and I went to the Jefferson. It was kinda funny because a wedding reception was going on and we could hear all of their music. Mom.....the ChaCha Slide???

This Gingerbread House has always amazed me! It is SO life-like. I would love to be able to help make this one year!

Here's a list of everything used to make the Gingerbread House...

Outside...I LOVE THIS..

Did you know that there used to be alligators kept in the fountain at the Jefferson??? Crazy, huh! I never knew that. You can read the history about that here: Alligators. I love how they still keep some alligators around...haha.


During after-Christmas sales in 2009, Mom bought a new Christmas tree. The lights were amazing-each bulb had two colors on it! But she wanted white lights. So I took all of those colored lights off (and it is HARD to take lights off a pre-lit tree!!!) and put the white ones on. We added a new Christmas tree in the house! Um, hello, I do not have a problem with that! Our dining room is purple, so the tree had a lot of purple and glass ornaments on it, and it was really cool!

Our little Chesnut is getting older and can't stay inside anymore during the night. With the nights getting colder and colder, he might've froze to death, so dad built him is own house. And this is no ordinary dog house; it has a heater in it!! haha. So, Abby and I only felt it would be appropriate to decorate Chesnut's house for Christmas as well. He loved the decorations; he told me so.


Be on the lookout for another post full of Christmas pictures!