The Holidays in Washington!

 The holiday season is often long and quite involved! We started our holiday season off with a celebration of Yoshi's birthday!  A little known fact about me is that Yoshi is my favorite mario character, and Super Mario World is my favorite game. Lego must have been reading my mind when they created this awesome lego set! Our family had never put one together until now, and we may be a little bit obsessed!

My only picture of our Thanksgiving is this cream cheese, cranberry, jalapeno spread we made for an appetizer. This will be a new staple at our table each year! We spent the day with some of our oldest military band friends and a friend from college and his family. It was untraditional and still totally awesome.

As a musical family the holidays also means lots of performances! Here are some pics and clips of many of our musical outings:

Here's some pics of the screen catching Cade's performances at Oberlin! So exciting to hear everything he's up to. I wish my parents had been able to watch all my performances while I was far away from home!

Here's Alex and I at the SOGO HoHo!

Look who's home for the holidays!

My classroom all ready for the Wildcat Choir to do their winter performance!

They did great!

I actually got to see Dan's holiday performance this year- usually we end up with performances on top of each other.

Alex had a most excellent holiday choir concert!

And don't forget the Messiah sing-along at the Washington Center. The SOGO kids do such an amazing job, and Cade got to come back and play with the group. 

In case you can't tell, the Washington center had fake snow falling outside the main doors

Dan found a friend to sing the Messiah with, lol

Goofy cade faces

The brass kids played in the lobby after the Messiah

This is our second year cutting down a real tree. This tree was full, beautiful and REALLY hard to take down at the the end of the season, none of us wanted to say goodbye to it.

I tried a few new ways of decorating our house...

This is a window above our front door

Dan and I did a date night to my work holiday party at Insert Coin. They had different character hairs on the mirrors in the bathroom. Heya peach! Afterwards we went to the glass museum in Tacoma and caught the end of the boat parade with all of their christmas lights!

Can you believe these bugs are made of GLASS???

The Messiah performance was on December 23rd this year and that left one day of Christmas celebrations before beginning our travels for the holiday break. Cade spent the first portion of the day with Jorie and her family- they are WAY too cute!

While they celebrated at Jorie's house we celebrated with the three of us and some smash burgers and fries, our new Christmas Eve tradition two years running.

Also a second year in the running is our Christmas eve games. And not just tabletop or jackbox games, we're talking games that get messy and silly. First up was using those roll-up party blowers to transfer straws to your neighbor.

Then unraveling a roll of crepe paper to see who could do it the fastest, and then making a mess!

Then our favorite, slide the soda can and land in certain spots for prizes or dares. Alex got his nails painted. Jorie got to throw a whipped cream pie at Alex, and Cade had to try and chug a sprite.

Playing piano duets!

We all had a wonderfully cozy evening of fun and games and then got ready for bed. We may have used our early christmas present.

Christmas morning came and went with some light presents and cinnamon rolls early in the morning so we could head to the airport to visit family. First stop Denver!

Dan had this made for me at the glass museum without my knowledge! Love a melted snowman!