Christmas!!!

Christmas has come and gone.  It was a good Christmas, even if it was fairly different from previous years.  First of all, I'm married.  Yeah, that's different, but really, really awesome too!  Julie's parents are really cool.  They were willing to fly both of us out there for Christmas, but since I had to work all of last week, Julie is the only one that went.  I don't know everything that went on, but I do know that Julie had an amazing time and barely slept all week long.

Lucky for me, we had a few friends stay in the area over break.  There was only one day that I didn't spend at least a little bit of time with someone else here in Provo while Julie was gone.  I was lucky enough to get Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and the day after off work, so I got a 3 day weekend, and I didn't even lose any hours either!  I worked a full 40 hours last week, and I get 40 hours this week too!  Anyway, Julie got back in town the morning of Christmas Eve, so I went and picked her up (Thanks Jeremy for letting use use your car all break!)  As soon as she got home, she crashed for a good 3 hour nap.  Julie NEVER takes naps.  She was TIRED.  We still didn't have anything to put in our stockings, so we went to Walmart only to find that it was stripped bare.  It was crazy.  It actually wasn't as busy as on Monday when we went back to grab some groceries (the return line went half way across the store).  But we had a nice Christmas Eve just being together.  Before we went to bed, we read Luke 2 by candle light.  This is, more or less, what our Christmas looked like:

We didn't get a tree.  We were going to put lights on the dragon, but the only lights we could find on Saturday were icicle lights or net lights...  Yeah...  So instead, we had... swords...  Whatever.  We'll do something better than this next year, for sure.  One of our friends that Julie met her freshmen year here at BYU is from Orem, so we ended up spending most of Christmas evening there at his mom's house. In short, it was just a really simple Christmas, but it was fun.

Because I had Monday off as well, we decided that we were going to make some yummy food!  I used the recipes from the Chinese food cookbook that I got last year for Christmas, and we made Broccoli Beef and Chinese Dumplings.  It was so good!  I think that the dumplings turned out better than the other dish, but it was still a lot of fun.

After making and eating dinner, we went to the dollar theater to watch Real Steel.  If you haven't seen it yet, go see it!  It was such a good movie!  Both of us really loved it.  We went with Michael, the same friend who we spent Christmas day with.  It was just a really nice, relaxing day.  But come Tuesday, my three day weekend was over, and I had to go back to work.  Work has been okay, nothing special.  But that has also left Julie home alone all day :-( NO FUN.  We just remembered yesterday that we got her some Zumba DVD's a month or so ago, so she's going to keep herself busy doing Zumba.  On top of that, we are having a good friend from study abroad over tonight.  Geneva is one of the happiest people you will ever meet!  We're excited to have dinner with her.  Then tomorrow night, we are having a small party at our place with some friends and family who are still in Provo for New Years.  We're going to make pizza, play games and just have fun.  Perhaps we'll actually have some more pictures after the party (but don't hold your breath, neither of us ever take pictures...)