It's a Cali Christmas

Christmas 2012!

No snow, No Christmas tree, no stockings, this year for christmas was very different for me. With recently moving into our own place, we didn't have much money to do any shopping or give gifts to other people. Other than exchanging gifts, which we were only able to do by the grace of God, and the money some our family helped us out with, the only other person we got to get a gift for was my mother.

In early November we found a ceramic painting shop, its one of those well known chains, Color Me Mine. I had been to these kind of places off and on throughout my life, so I knew how they worked, but I hadn't seen one in Cali yet, and Michael had never done it. So I thought wouldn't it be nice if we made something together, then I was like... "Hey, how about we do our designs on something?" Michael was all for that. So we were just looking through the stuff they had to paint and I saw all the plates and platters and thought, wouldn't it be great if we did something for my Mother, considering how much she has done for me all my life and how much she has done for the both of us while we have been together, and Michael thought that was a great idea as well, so we decided to do our designs on a plate/platter for my mother.

So we picked out a platter, and I started mapping our first move out on it, while Michael went to grab us some food.

All-in-all it took us five visits to the Color me Mine shop and over 30 hours of work, almost every weekend up until Christmas and we pulled it off!

For those of you who don't know, my Husband and I do work with markers for fun, we have a thick sketch pad, and we do these designs while watching movies, passing the sketch pad and markers back and forth, taking turns. (almost all of our work is in one of my blog posts, I think its the pumpkin post from October) but this time what we did was we worked on it at the same time, just different sections. so we both do out own thing, although we do touch each others up, make changes sometimes.

Anyways back to Christmas.

So my Mother loved the plate, and since we saw her and some family on Christmas eve, Christmas day was just us. For the very first time we got to do whatever we wanted, and damn it was nice :)

After we woke up, we started off the day by making cinnamon rolls and bacon, then watching Elf (probably my favorite christmas movie ever) then we decided to open our gifts.

I had gotten Michael some toys that reminded him if his childhood, and one was for the both of us, Play-dough :) he had picked them out from a trip to Toys-R-Us we had the month before. 

I also got him a sweatshirt, looks a little like a letter jacket, just with nothing on it except the colors red and black, and a really nice wood box for him to keep all his small valuables (watches, flask, cuff links, etc)

and he ended up getting me a necklace I wanted from Forever 21, it's metal but looks like lace, a brown, leather looking studded purse I had wanted, and a record player with two record :) which I had wanted a record player for years, so I was super excited! and it is so cool looking too, its bright red and looks like an old fashioned radio, which in fact it doubles as a radio. How cool right!

We ended up doing more things all day, I wont go too much into detail, but we had some pretty great food and just had fun with each other, relaxing and stuff.

We ended up making scalloped potatoes with ham, and a salad, and wine. It was really nice! Especially since we both love scalloped potatoes with ham! It may even be a tradition every christmas :)

So we ended up having a wonderful christmas, the only down side was we wasted a couple hours with Michael trying to fix something on the computer, and he had been getting sick the last couple days so it wasn't really feeling at his best.

But everything was just wonderful! It was nice having a relaxing Christmas, and even though in some ways it didn't feel like christmas at all, I'm still very thankful for my Husband and our mini christmas we had together, in our new apartment :)

P.S. I'm still going to try and put up the Christmas eve photo shoot soon.