A New Near Year Gift Tradition

Who needs New Year’s resolutions? I’m excited about my new New Year’s tradition!

A few years ago, I opted to send out my annual card/newsletter update in the spring as a way to reduce a little holiday stress and free up valuable time to spend with family. I LOVED the way that felt, so I took it a step further this year.

This year, instead of doing Christmas gifts for friends, I chose to do New Year’s gifts!  I told close friends that I had something for them, but I probably wouldn’t have it ready until after the New Year (have to manage those expectations, you know). That allowed me time to relax and enjoy the holidays more, plus instead of frantically trying to finish everything up by Christmas, I spent the last couple of nights relaxing, watching movies, and working on the gift tags that went with the gifts. It was heavenly!

Of course, we still went with Christmas gifts for family—I think the grandchildren would have a hard time getting excited about the New Year gift idea!

The idea of New Year gifts went along with our gifts this year—a gift of essential oils that we hope will help those we care about have a more healthy, happy year—but I like the idea so much that I think we’ll continue with New Year gifts next year, regardless of the actual gift.

I hope your holidays were as peaceful and enjoyable as mine! And I am very excited about what this new year has to offer all of us!

A New Gardner Family Tradition

Hope your Christmas was as fabulous as mine! I took a week off from blogging—plus everything else. As I mentioned on my last blog, our whole family spent the holidays in a cabin in the mountains. I checked my messages once a day (sometimes), ignored calls from my assistant (she said she was starting to get a complex), stayed in my pajamas for several days (I did exercise and shower every day, but just climbed back into pajamas afterwards), and loved every minute of it!

And I knew we would all come back with a new family tradition or perhaps barely speaking. (Just kidding, of course—I knew we would get along great!) I’m happy to report that we have a new family tradition; we will definitely be doing this again!

I have several highlights and one lowlight and tons of photos to share!

Highlights—

• Kids went sledding
• The Whites went skiing nearly every day
• Several of us went snowboarding
• Puzzles, games, and movies
• Making gingerbread houses
• I didn’t leave the cabin! (except to step outside and watch the sledding)
• Lots of delicious food!
• Beautiful days (a nice mix of sunny and slightly overcast—no big storms until after we headed back home)
• Visiting
• The highest highlight of all—doing absolutely nothing that we didn’t want to!

Lowlight (is that a real word?)—

• Starting the day after we got there, at least one person was sick with a fever; the last few days there were several sick Gardners.  We called it the “flu that keeps on giving.”

Just a quick note—I’m still in a semi-holiday mode, working from home. So don’t expect to hear from me too much in the next few days. Hope the rest of your holidays are wonderful!

 

 

A New Family Tradition?

It’s the day before the night before Christmas. . . I can’t believe it’s here already! We’re getting ready to make Gardner family history—for the first time with our children grown and married, we’re going to spend the holidays all together, under the same roof. We’ve reserved a large cabin in the mountains, and we’re going to see how it goes. We’ll either come back with a possible new tradition or come back determined never to try anything like that again! (Here’s hoping for a new tradition!)

Part of me is wondering if it’s worth all the work—we’re busy planning meals and activities, packing suitcases, making sure we have all the bases covered for six separate families. And part of me can’t wait to be all together with my favorite people during my favorite holiday.

We’re hoping to get out the door today, so we can just relax and have fun tomorrow and the next few days. It would certainly be much easier to just stay at home and have the girls and their families come and go, but I really think this will be a wonderful experience.

I’m planning on focusing pretty much entirely on our family, so I probably won’t blog—but I’ll give a full report when we get back home! In the meantime, I hope you have a wonderful Christmas, full of peace and love!

Holiday Hellos Challenge Winners

It's taken me longer than it should have (yes, I admit, I actually forgot!) to choose the winners of the Holiday Hellos Creative Challenge. So sorry. . . my holiday to-do list is long and is clamoring for my attention.

I did get the winners selected and posted finally--check them out! It's a great way to get into the holiday spirit (if you're not already)!

Grandma Pat's Party Weekend

 

As always, our Grandma Pat Christmas party came and went much faster than we would have liked! This weekend really is our only full-family reunion, and I look forward to it every year!

We do pretty much the same thing every year, and I think that’s one of the reasons we look forward to it—we know what’s going to happen, we know what we’re going to be doing, and we are ready to love every minute of it.

Everyone comes into town on Friday night; some make it in time for dinner, and the rest make it at some point. Saturday morning, we start with breakfast (the Gardners are in charge of breakfast, and we always do the same thing—cold cereal for the kids; homemade granola, yogurt, and berries; and breakfast burritos with scrambled eggs, homemade salsa, ham, bacon, and cheese). The rest of the day is spent snacking (healthy and not-so-healthy!), visiting, playing games, and crafting. The kids have a project they work on, and the women always have something too—this year we took along some projects for leadership conference as well, and we enlisted extra hands to help us.

In the early afternoon we gather together for a kids’ gift exchange and then later for a Christmas program. We start by watching a five-minute nativity video, and the kids dress up in nativity clothing and act out the Christmas story. Then we do some caroling, each family shares a talent, and we end with a slideshow (this year we included a few video clips). The slideshow captures everybody’s attention, with people cheering when they see themselves or their favorite cousins on the screen.

We also exchange our “Year-in-Review” scrapbook pages, so everyone can see in photo form some of the year’s highlights in everybody’s families. We have dinner and dessert, and things wind down with more visiting.

This morning, we got up and went to church with those family members who hadn’t left yet, had an “eat-everything-that-is-leftover” brunch, and then headed home. Traveling was uneventful—a little snow on the way down, no snow on the way home. What a wonderful way to start off Christmas week!