CHRISTMAS 2015

Oh Christmas 2015. The year my grandma died, and the year my mom put on a joyful and hysterical violin concert for us in her living room after quietly taking lessons for a year. 

Just the right mix of the necessary ingredients.

All of my thoughts are a jumble still and I'm just now finding my New Years footing. There's an essay bubbling, it's like, right there. But in the meantime I wanted to share a few photos from our Christmas. Including but not limited to . . .  surprise violin concertos!

Oh my gosh, my Julie. I have never laughed so hard OR felt so much love + pride for my mom + this family she created than I did that night. This is going to be one of those flashes of life that I see right before I die. 

(from Sycamore Street Press! best house slippers ever)

Lots of cozies and lounging around the house. Stretchy pants for dayyyyys.

We did our traditional Christmas Eve caroling through the neighborhood.

complete with cinnamon rolls! and devil huck! aaaand yeah. this year we matched.

Christmas Morning was beautiful and quiet.

Brandon was a fabulous grouch that morning, it was actually fully wonderful. (Who saw that one snap from Christmas morning? I'm still dying over it.) 

As always, presents were followed by our traditional egg and ham sauce Christmas breakfast. 

We did a lot of looking through of old family photos, and we talked for hours about our crazy Grandma Shirley, about how funny yet horrifyingly terrifying she could sometimes be. ;)

shirley on her 13th birthday

shirley + grandpa dave with me + amanda when we lived in south korea 

ps these next photos are fully unrelated, but my mom and I took some eeeeepic baby portraits together...

right? come on

After Christmas we drove down to Grants Pass, spent an afternoon at grandma + grandpa's just grandpa Stanger's house now.

epic floral wallpaper in the bathroom

and . . . well, everywhere, really

us in grandma's work space, cue a little heartbreak 

grandma's crazy insane + perfect decorating sense

the fanciest rogue river hotel room EVER on the PLANET

And then we said goodbye. 

It was very sweet. A beautiful service. The Lovin sisters sang a few songs, the family shared all the best Shirley stories, there was a lot of love that day. I touched her cold hands as I said goodbye. She looked so small and tight. I got to tell her she was a stinker, and that I loved her so much. It has truly been an honor to be her granddaughter. 

ps this was funny --

To me, anyway. :) Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, The prophet Joseph Smith, President George W. Bush . . . . and me. Thanks grandpa! That's some good old-guy company to be in!

Well, so hey. Merry Christmas from us Holbrooks. Bitter and sweet and filled with love + laughter, tinges of heartache, and lots and lots of turkey.  Can't complain. ;)

THE HOLBROOKS HAVE A TREE!

It's tree time it's tree time!

Per tradition, we set out the Friday after Thanksgiving to get ourselves a tree. 

This time, because we do not live in a cement wonderland anymore, we went out to the source to find our tree and chop her down off the side of Moscow Mountain.

Moscow actually has a mountain in it that is called Moscow Mountain. It's hysterical.

Looking for a tree is a spiritual affair, I've said that before, so we'll leave it at that, BUT! Spiritual affair or no, hunting for a tree in 25-degree weather is not for the faint of heart. Huck was a pile of kid holiday misery. It made our experience feel quite authentic.  (You know that mom singing "Deck The Halls" at the top of her lungs while her kid covers his ears in mortification and can't wait to get out of there? It is a terribly satisfying experience once you're on the other side of that situation, it turns out.)

And then, we found her.

(We kind of wanted something sparse and needly to show off our homemade ornaments. She is definitely sparse and needly.)

Husbands playing lumberjack. NOT BAD.

One-handed! 

Oh lights. Every year I'm stuck finishing the Christmas lights.

It's okay. 

AND NOW AS I HAVE SAID CONCERNING CHRISTMAS TREES!

Presenting a brief history of The Lovin-Holbrook lineage of trees:

Brandon grew up with colored Christmas lights, and a tree filled with ornaments collected over the years to represent each of the Holbrook kids' interests and activities. Brandon's collection are mostly made up of soccer and Garfield ornaments. There you have it.

Natalie grew up with white Christmas lights, and a tree YOU DIDN'T TOUCH. Because it was a glorious masterpiece of Juliemom craft and to touch it was to disrespect a whole matriarchal line of perfection in the form of yuletide tree, and so you just didn't do it.

My Juliemom grew up with Miss Shirley Jean, who is famous for never getting her tree to her liking until nearly January, and then leaving it up until February, so all can properly enjoy its majesty.

My dad grew up with a big, fat Christmas tree, with silky needles and those red string Christmas balls, with colored lights meant for the outdoors drooping behind a generous waterfall of tinsel. A gloriously puffy white angel presiding on top.

Huck is growing up with some funny kind of middle ground, where THE RIGHT OF TREE IS MINE, but it never looks the same from year to year, and Huck is always involved in the planning of ornament placement, and here and there I'll throw a marshmallow garland on it that Huck can eat as much of as he likes. Nice of me, huh?

I also believe in naming Christmas trees, because our trees are like our Power Ranger spirit animals, and it's important you honor the spiritual nature of such a choice. Huck can tell you that much. So this one's name is Amy Grant. Because she is thin and spindly. Just like Amy Grant's voice. 

(No no I love Amy Grant stop for a minute baby I'm so glad you're mine!) 

(But her voice IS a little bit needly.)

She's also our first Holbrook Christmas tree with colored lights. 

Here she is! 

She's rather squinky. I kind of like her.

IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS!

Everywhere you go! Even the chicken coop! (Shhh, they love it.)

Let's run this one down by the numbers.

Number of bowls of Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge that I need to finally throw away because we've all moved on already:

Lots.

Number of days since the outside has seen anything above 25 degrees:

Too many.

Number of Santa Letter rewrite requests from The Boy Who Can't Make His Mind Up:

Millions.

Number of chicken stockings hung on the chicken coop:

I know, I am fully ridiculous.

Number of days left until Christmas:

This one requires actual math. I'm out.

IT'S HERE! 

Guys December is a super crazy month. 

Most holiday seasons I like launch myself into it like a crazed lunatic and go, go, go, but this time around it's been a super slow start. Brandon's been pestering me reminding me gently to start our photo books so we have them finished on time, and I'm like, can't you see I have important Roswell to attend to here? 

(I like to skip past the parts involving the Sheriff as well as any scene ever involving anybody wondering or caring about where they came from? This leaves episodes about 10 minutes long, mainly consisting of longing glances at people and Maria and Liz being all cute and eye-rolly.) 

(I swear though this show is the STUPIDEST.)

But we got our Christmas cards picked! Which is saying something! I even bought my Charlie Brown Christmas stamps! Ho ho ho! 

One of these days I'll give up and stop trying to keep everybody's versions of our current address up to date. But today is not that day!

Postable sent them to us! I personalized the inside to say, "Now let's make sure we're still on yours. We've moved!" etc etc. I know, I'm a genius.

Oh boy.

This Christmas already feels especially Christmassy. I just have so much hope for this Christmas, for all sorts of reasons (Clomid don't fail me now, cervical mucus don't desert me . . .) (Anastasia reference? Sorry.) I made it through November and November was hard. November was especially hard. Sucky as all crap. I want my body back. I want my energy back, I want my sunny outlook back, and my motivation back, OR! I want to make a fat, gurgly baby, NOW. It's that kind of thing where I want a baby the way you'd want a really good sandwich after being rescued from a desert island and you're starving. 

But just this morning I felt that stupid angst started to turn around, and there's hope on the other side of it, I can almost see it. There's such a nostalgic feeling about Idaho right now. Planning a drive to Portland once Brandon's finished his semester, remembering to tread carefully down the icy parts of town, freezing drafts coming in from very old doors, hauling out the decorations I handmade in a little bedroom across town seven or eight years ago. I've been missing Petey The Pan and Barney McStuffins like the dickens. I've been re-reading old Babble posts and feeling a spark of recognition for this old feeling of pessimism splashed with optimism. Good things are coming. Let's do this, Christmas.

"Cheers!" hope says. "You're still on my mailing list!"

SHOP THE POST:

HAPPY CHRISTMAS, RON

Only a week or so late but hey! Here's a little bit of our Christmas in Utah.

For Christmas Utah gave us snow. And snow and snow and snow! It was lovely. The mountains were bare when we landed but by the time we woke up Christmas morning, everything had been covered in a freshly dusted topping of white. It was pretty magical. The boys went sledding and the girls did jigsaw puzzles. My niece Morgan filled us in on her secret for 45-minute showers: she brings her iPhone into the shower with her in a ziplock bag, tapes it to the wall, and then watches an episode of Parks and Rec while she washes her hair. Right? I'm still basking in the genius of this idea.

This is Brandon. Brandon is my husband. It's funny how after 11 years of marriage one can still discover new things about one's husband and his family. Such as: how deep an aversion to planning in advance some people can actually have. You know by-the-seat-of-their-pants types, right? Change-your-mind-but-forget-to-mention-it-to-anyone types? I'm finally getting into the swing of it, learning not to ask, "So what's the plan today?" and just paying attention to the subtle cues and rolling with it. One day, someday, I swear I'll be so chill. I'll be, like, the chillest person on the planet. All thanks to Brandon, the chill despot. I finally got past the thing where my inner planner goes on overdrive to compensate for the lack of planning, and now I'm like, sooo almost there.

Anyway, inflatable reindeer ring toss games.

My niece Jaycey got a Polaroid for Christmas that she instantly put to good use, terrorizing all of us when we least expected it. :) I rounded them up while she was out of the room and really looked at all of them, all of the faces in the family, the aunts and uncles and grandparents cousins, and I realized, you know what, these are an AMAZING keepsake! Ultra candid and horribly embarrassing and just so human, you know? I think I'm gong to need to remember this for next year on Christmas morning. I snapped a quick photo of our three so I could always remember. Brandon looks especially good here I think. :)

Huck was in little boy heaven on earth with his cousins. He idolizes them and they were so, so, so sweet with him. They wore him out clean good, and I got all the exhausted big baby snuggles a girl could want at night. That's some heavy duty mom heaven on earth right there. We are in cousin withdrawal now. Brooklyn is in stark shortage of cousins, somebody needs to fix that for us.

When in Utah there are a certain number of things one must do in order to fully experience the Utah in all the Utah glory. 

FIRST: Eat at Cafe Rio, at least thrice. The pork salad. 

THE PORK MOTHER EFFING SALAD.

SECONDLY: Fondle at least one of Courty's boobs. I don't know, you guys. This was such an awkward moment for my chest. My girls finally realized in that moment the full extent of their breastly inadequacy, and they still haven't recovered. I'd told them! I mean, I knew they sucked! (HAR HAR) I don't know how they called themselves boobs all this time, when THAT was parading around needing actual support and things. But, anyway. 

I dreamed about nursing that night. It was very Freudian.

THIRDEST: Try whatever currently trendy food situation is happening in Provo. It was a Dirty Diet Dr Pepper double header! In a Swig vs Sodalicious showdown, I vote the Sodalicious sugar cookie the superior sugar cookie. Though both tasted mostly like sawdust. #wompwomp. Swig's DDDP was more carbonated than Sodalicious's, so take from that what you will, and soda accordingly.

LAST OF ALL: Boardgames, the national past time of the Holbrook clan. There were lots of board games going around. Most of the Holbrook classic board games are above Huck's skill level, though for his dad's sake he managed to get really into Candy Land for a minute. His dad may live to regret it. I think these photos of an edamame-fueled Chutes + Ladders game rather depict the thrill of victory and agony of defeat quite nicely, actually.

Chutes & Ladders is a pretty cruel game, yo. 

(Penguin cheerleaders.)

And then we had MORE SNOW. 

And it didn't strand us this time. 

My father-in-law's assortment of funny Russian hats for the win. :)