Christmas Catch-up

Merry Christmas everybody! I hope you all made it on the Nice list this year. We have been having a great holiday spending time with family and each other, playing Wii, going to the temple with my sister for her first time, shopping for extra last minute surprises, holding Baby Emma, and hanging out with friends.
I just noticed on my sister Jennie's blog list that it says "House of Nash" updated 1 week ago.  That's kind of lame for me.  Especially since I complained to my other sister Jessica that when I got up on Christmas morning there would be no blogs to read since nobody would be blogging Christmas Eve.  Jessica surprised me though by posting a poem on her blog that she wrote just for me called "On the Corner of Memory and Santa Claus".  And before you go thinking I am lame for checking blogs first thing on Christmas morning, just know that I have a really bad habit of waking up at 4 in the morning Christmas Day that hasn't abated despite my advancing age.  The rest of my family has always made me wait until at least 7 a.m. before I can start rousing everybody and rustling them into the living room.  A girl's gotta have something to read while she waits, right?

This year we spent Christmas Eve and morning with my family, then headed down to Paul's parents' house for a ham dinner with Paul's siblings and more present-unwrapping. And now that presents have been opened, I can finally post a photo of what we gave people this Christmas:

I literally spent days in November sewing aprons and making bottled apple pie filling for the women in Paul's family and for my sister who just had the baby. I am not much of a sewer or anything, so these took me forever - way longer than I thought they would or I would have just gone and bought them - but the aprons did turn out pretty cute.

We also took family portraits for each of our families.

The Nash Family:

The Casebolt Family (with my grandparents and aunts):

Me with Baby Emma:

Me with my sisters and niece.  People tell us all the time that we definitely look like sisters and I have always been kind of suspicious of those comments until I saw this photo.  I really do think we look a lot alike here.

This was a really special Christmas for my family because it is the first one in 21 years that there was a baby in the family. Also, next year will be really different since my family will be spread far and wide with Jessica in Uruguay. So in two years when we all reconvene for another Casebolt Christmas there will have been a lot of changes.

Anyway, it really is the most wonderful time of the year in a lot of ways and we have been enjoying this last bit of break before work begins in January. Now its time to get to work on that list of New Year's resolutions, right? Anybody?