Cold nights & Pretty lights

This Christmas, as part of mine & my sister's stocking stuffers, Santa gave us tickets to see the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens Gardenfest of Lights!  I've been several years in the past, but I never get tired of going!  This year, Matt and I went during the first week of 2012, so even though everyone elses' Christmas spirit was dying down, ours wasn't!....okay, okay.....so maybe it was just mine that wasn't ;)

We picked the best night to go, I think, because it was "bring your dog night" or something and there were dogs everywhere!  All dogs from these itty bitty dogs you just want to curl up with, to HUGE dogs whose top of the head came up to Matt's shoulder, just when standing on all fours! Yeah, that dog was insanely big!  In the middle of the park where they have a hot chocolate & coffee stand, they even had dog biscuits you could buy that night! ha!

Enjoy some pictures from the evening!

"..And I traveled through the seven layers of the Candy Cane Forest..."

These were my favorite trees!!

Proud of Matt for taking this picture! :)

These next two pictures aren't "mess ups."  They had this awesome green light that just shot out white dots everywhere.  Not gonna lie, it was fun to play in, haha!

Operation Krank

For Christmas with my dad's side of the family, we always do a Chinese Gift Exchange. It's always hilarious to see what people come up with as their gift to bring, and we seriously laugh the WHOLE time!! It's great and I love being around my family!

This year, my cousins and my aunt and uncle were going to the Dominican Republic for Christmas and wanted to save their money for the trip so they did not do the gift exchange, which we had no problem with all! We were glad they still came to celebrate and spend time with us, however, that didn't stop us from a little prank we planned...

They left the Thursday before Christmas, and through tons of back and forth emails, the rest of us decided to go over to their house Friday night to prank them. My cousin Gabby was in on the prank and left us a house key. She had told us at our Christmas get-together that they didn't really have many decorations up since they weren't going to be in town for Christmas. After getting inside we went up to the attack and got all of their Christmas decorations out!! We carried so many boxes downstairs and then just went to town! We didn't care if the decorations looked good....we just wanted them all OUT!


My cousin, Aimee, making their computer desk look very festive!

Mom putting a Christmas tree skirt around the chess table.

My sister, Abby, adding ornaments to the dining room table centerpiece.

Okay, so, they had some water damage that had not been completely fixed yet, so what did we do? Decorate of course!!  Here's Dad putting nails up...

..and the final product!

Aunt Diane and Aunt Vickie! 
You can also read Aunt Diane's post about Operation Krank by clicking here!

Matt putting up one of the small Christmas trees.

And Mom decorating the other small tree!

This is a bench they have in the kitchen...we literally just THREW stuff everywhere!

Who doesn't love a pot full of ornaments on the stove?!

Their Christmas tree was locked away in the shed...so this is what Matt and Dad brought in.  And the socks? Those were laying in the den floor when we got there so we used them to decorate!

We raided the fridge..

I combined pictures that I took and Aunt Diane took and made a photo book out of them.  We set up a lot of fun pictures to add at the end, and this was one of them. We were going for the "Home Alone" look. (More about the photobook below.)

So, as I was saying, I put together a photobook to send to them documenting our pranking adventure.  I also wrote a funny "'Twas the night" poem that went throughout the book.

Sorry this picture is turned wrong, it won't upload correctly for some odd reason!

This was the last picture in the photobook.

 Now, for the rest of my family to see....here's the packaging/sending process of the photobook!!!

A note I included in the box..

DONE!!!

I was literally running around like a mad woman trying to package and deliver this box.  I had been talking with Gabby throughout the day to find out when no one would be home so I could take.  Then, come to find out, Uncle Xel was leaving work early!!!!  I'm not sure how, but I managed to miss him on the road, so the delivery was a SUCCESS (as was the entire prank itself!!)!

And if you're interested, here is the 'Twas the Night poem I wrote for the book:

'Twas the night before Christmas Eve,
No Sant'Annas were home.
The water had been turned off,
and Millie was alone. (Millie = their dog)

We hadn't been to visit yet,
But we knew something wasn't right.
There was no Christmas tree up,
And outside, there were no lights.

In the den we noticed something-
two big holes in the ceiling,
So we added some decoration
For that touch of Christmas feeling.

We grabbed what we could,
Not caring if it looked nice,
We put out all the decorations,
Including a mess of lights.

The Christmas tree was missing,
Locked away in the shed,
So we found a substitute tree,
And decorated that instead.

We were all "gung-ho"
For this great Christmas prank,
But Victoria wasn't so sure-
She didn't understand Operation Krank!

But we quickly taught her well,
As we headed upstairs,
And three of us grabbed pillows,
Stuffed dogs and teddy bears. (My sister, our cousin Victoria, and I all went up to Alison's room and had a pillow fight!! It made for great pics for the book!)

After all our hard work,
We elves needed to be fed,
But we couldn't find anything to eat,
Not even a loaf of bread.

Once snacktime had passed,
A few bottles we found, (wine bottles, of course)
Vickie, Diane and Susan had their fun
And didn't make another sound. (we took pictures of them passed out on the couch!)
So we put away all the boxes,
Made sure Millie was fed,
Then we laughed at the thought
of you getting mad before bed.

a new year, a new look!

Wow, where to begin?! How about with the fact that it's 1:39am, and I have been sitting at my desk in front of this computer for the past 2 1/2 hours changing up this blog!  My eyes are probably about to pop out at this point, but once I got started with the changes, I was on a roll!

The other day, I discussed my first post of 2011 and compared things then to things now.  One of those was changing up the layout of my blog.  The last time I changed it was right after the start of 2011 and sometime in December I had already been thinking about changing the layout.  Maybe after a year, I can't keep looking at the same ol' thing! ha.

So I spent too much time sizing up a new header (I probably could've spent less time if I were working at a normal hour...), created a new blog name and blog address, changed up the background, fonts, color, etc. and even added "The Daily Puppy" on the sidebar--I mean, come on, how cute are those little faces??  I even finally figured out how to change the Time Zone Settings to Eastern Time! I don't even know why it was set on Pacific!! haha! I've also spent quiet a bit of time saying, "Oh, duhhhh, Mallory, that's how you do that!"

Anyway, I would love for you to tell me what you think of this layout.  I'm sure you'll see a couple more tweaks within the next few days, but honestly, this is not a normal hour for me to still be awake!!