First Hanukkristmas!

Aaron and I stayed in Vermont for the holidays and had a joint Hanukkah and Christmas celebration.  It was my first Hanukkah and his first Christmas.

On the first night of Hanukkah, I jumbled my way through the phonetic "translation" (there is a word for this which may be transcription or may be transliteration) of the prayers and lit the candle.  For the rest of Hanukkah, I had the tune of the prayer stuck in my head even though I only knew approximate sounds of how it is supposed to go.  We also made latkes, which were very tasty, and played dreidel (which I am great at and is 100% luck-based).  Aaron got me Rock Band 3, and it featured prominently in all our future celebrations.

On Christmas, Aaron was really excited and we woke up early.  I put the casserole in the oven and we played Rock Band while it baked.  Our tree looked like this:

It's hard to tell in this picture, but we had lots of presents and it looked very festive.  I made Aaron a stocking, and that was his first present.  I modeled it on the ones that my mom made for our family, and I'm super super happy with how it came out.

Here we are opening some gifts!

In the afternoon, we watched some NBA basketball and Skyped back to Michigan.  We loved watching Mckenna try to talk with a mouth full of candy.  Aaron's dad was in town for skiing, so he was able to join us for their Christmas Day tradition - getting Chinese food.  We still have not found a good Chinese place around here, and we tried a new one and had some pretty bad food.  But, they had maple walnut ice cream, so it all worked out okay in the end.  After dinner, we came home and lit the Hanukkah candles.  With Aaron's dad here, Aaron didn't have to sing the prayers solo.

On Monday we all went skiing, and had a fun time.  There was some new snow, which is nearly miraculous the way this winter has been going.

The first day of 2012 is going well so far.  We started it out at midnight, watching out the window as fireworks peeked over the roof of the houses across the street.  Now we just need to kick these foggy spring-like days and begin winter!