A Merry Christmas Update

Merry Christmas everyone.

Christmas time can be a hectic time. My wife and I do the busy, "visiting family" thing, spending three days traveling between households to see everyone. We spend one day with my dad, then the next with her parents and then the following day with my mom. It's a go go go time of year and I'm really glad that I took a few days vacation from work just to fit in some relaxing time. My wife and I try to spend one day alone together as well to have our own little Christmas with just the two of us. We did that on December 23rd this year. Let's take a look at what we did shall we? I'll walk you through our day.

So far we haven't had any snow. Instead we woke up to rain and a dense fog that has lasted a long time now. With global warming nowadays I wonder if we will ever get snow on Christmas again? It seems to be more and more rare as I get older.

The first thing that we did when we woke up was lite the fire, and by that I mean pushing the button to start it.

Then we lit some incense in our German smoker. You can't see it smoking unfortunately.

When it comes to gifts at Christmas my wife and I have gone through a few cycles. At the begining of the relationship we gave each other a lot of gifts. Then we hit a point where we felt that Christmas was too commercial so we eliminated presents entirely and gave each other nothing. After a few years of no presents we started to find that to be a little boring, so my wife came up with the idea that we would get each other one set of pajamas each year, open them in the morning and spend the entire day wearing them. We have done that for a few years now and it has been a lot of fun and I think its a good balance between maintaining the fun Christmas tradition of opening present, but without falling into the trap of over commercialism. Our little pajama Christmas has morphed just a little over the years to include lounge wear. A person only needs so many pajamas so now we basically get each other one comfy outfit of either pajamas or lounge wear, dealers choice.

Here is the outfit that I picked up for my wife. I added in a beanie this year. We call them "toques" in Canada, which is essentially a winter hat often with a pom on top.

We typically both buy each other an outfit from Roots Canada, which is a very traditional Canadian company that specializes in "Cabin wear," stuff you would wear at the cottage or around the house in winter.

She got me black sweatpants and a black waffle knit sweatshirt.

The outfit is covered in cat hair already.

She also bought me these cool socks this year. Flamingos and Jamaican flag!

We spent most of the day playing games in front of the fire and listening to Christmas music.

We played cribbage, Danish Solitaire and a roll and write game called Clever.

After that we took the dog for a walk and gave him a bath. He loves sleeping in front of the fire.

Then we made rum and egg nog drinks. I'm just noticing that the egg nog carton is on the French side. The carton is the egg nog.

We like Kraken rum with egg nog because it's spiced and has a hint of vanilla. It goes really well with the drink.

The element in our oven broke a few weeks back and we haven't replaced it yet so I'm limited to what I can cook. Everything has to be cooked on the stove top at the moment so I decided to do a stew for dinner. I make stew all the time and I wanted this one to be a little different so I made a German Goulash. I followed a recipe but broke from tradition by adding in orange peppers. It ended up being really good in the end.

The last thing that we did that night was watch a movie. We chose to watch the last Downton Abbey film. It wasn't Christmasy at all but still had that warm and happy vibe feel about it so it was a good choice in the end.

And that's it for our Christmas Day together. Merry Christmas everyone and happy holidays.