Merry Belated Christmas

I came down with a nasty cold this week, so blogging wasn't exactly at the top of my priority list, and it didn't help that Blogger was being a complete booger about uploading pictures. So in the interest of saving myself a lot of headaches, literal and metaphorical, I decided that I will just embed a Flickr slideshow of our Christmas pics this year. I took over 300, but managed to narrow down my favorites to about 50, which will be featured below.

Here's the basic gist of how our holiday went down. On Christmas Eve, we headed over to my Aunt Suza's house where all of my mom's family gets together. Most of the cousins are just a few years apart in age, so it is always fun to catch up with everyone. We stayed there until 1am, I think, with Alex asleep upstairs while we played games and ate until the wee hours of the morning. Alex woke up early Christmas morning, so I stalled him a bit before we finally woke up the rest of the family. We opened gifts, ate breakfast, napped, played games, and pretty much enjoyed a relaxing Christmas day at home.

The pictures do a pretty good job of illustrating our holiday, but a few words couldn't hurt, either. Instead of blogging about each picture, I've added a description about each one, which you can either read by linking directly to the set on Flickr and selecting each picture individually, or by clicking that little icon at the bottom right of the slideshow (the one with four arrows), the slideshow will fill your screen, and you can select the "options" button at the top right of the screen to check the box that mentions "title and description". I know that sounds a little complicated, but you will get the hang of it. If you want to see the entire collection, it can be accessed by clicking here.

If this works out okay, and I don't get too many complaints from the peanut gallery for taking the easy way out, I might consider this method every time I want to post more than just a handful of pictures. And knowing me, that will happen more often than not. Enjoy!



I guess I should conclude by saying that it was an awesome Christmas, made especially fun by the fact that Alex was old enough to (kind of sort of) understand what was happening, to get excited by his toys and the music and the people and the general hubbub that surrounds the holiday season. I am especially glad that my family was able to get together, and that Alex was able to see some folks that he hasn't seen in months and to meet some that he has never seen at all. We are so thankful for family and friends and health and safe travels, and we can't wait to see what next Christmas brings.