Holidays!

Guys, it’s freaking January.

When the?

What the?

I kept saying I couldn’t wait for the holidays to come, then when they were here I wanted them to go, and now I’m in that weird state where it’s the first week of January and I’m like, so what now? I’m supposed to just go back to normal life where there aren’t cookies and stuffing at my immediate reach?

I’m joking, sort of. I’m actually excited for 2017. There will be so many exciting things happening in 2017 for the After fandom. *screams and keeps lips sealed*

How were your Holidays?? Do you have any traditions?  Tell me about them in the comments (if you are bored and want to)

When I was growing up, we had so many traditions like, we put the Christmas tree up on Thanksgiving night and we would go to my mawmaw’s house (my biological dad’s mom) on Christmas Eve, and on that night we left cookies out for Santa to eat. I don’t even remember when I stopped believing in Santa, but I do remember when one of my friends told me Santa wasn’t real and I asked my mom, and she showed me a newspaper (totally fake) that said Santa liked chocolate milk and I believed in him again haha.

When my sister and I went to bed my parents would put the gifts from Santa under the tree unwrapped, that’s how we knew which ones were from my parents and which were from Santa, which Jordan and I still do now lol.

Also, is Santa supposed to be capitalized?? I don’t know lol.

So anyway, growing up I would wake up in the middle of the night every single Christmas Eve and go check out the gifts. I remember one year I had the best Christmas ever and got a karaoke machine and two Spice Girl dolls. Lolol.

Man that makes me feel ancient haha. I was obsessed with the Spice Girls, I’m sure you’re not surprised.

So, then I would go back to sleep and pretend that I didn’t see the gifts and let my parents sleep and extra hour. When everyone was awake, we would open gifts and my dad would drink a gallon of coffee and the living room would be full of wrapping paper. Christmas time brought some of my favorite memories growing up. Halloween too, but I’ll write about that at a later time.

When I was eighteen, I moved to Texas with Jordan (my husband) and we went back to Ohio for Christmas. We drove from Texas to Ohio with our little Pomeranian (his name was Nevens *cries*) The next year, Jordan was in Iraq and I wanted to stay in Texas in our place, so I stayed home and went to a friend’s house and spent the day with her family. The next year, Jordan was home, so went to Ohio. The year after that he was in Iraq again, and I stayed home. I think when Texas started feeling more like home to me, I wanted to stay there for the holidays. Especially when Jordan was deployed because I felt closer to him when I was in Texas.

This year I was slacking on the Christmas festivities. We lost our tree in the move to Los Angeles, so we had to get a new one. How does one lose a Christmas tree you ask? I have no idea, but Jordan wasn’t close to surprised that it happened lol. The move was insane, half of our stuff got broken in the process, including my favorite red table from Target that’s now discontinued *sigh*

So there we were without a Christmas tree a week before Christmas. So we decided to get a real tree and it was such a fun experience. I know it sounds ridiculous because it’s just a tree, but we went to a lot here in LA and walked around and picked out a tree. (we had no idea what we were supposed to get so we just pointed at one that I thought was pretty lol) We strapped it to the top of our car and went to Target to get ornaments. We hung up stockings and I stuffed Jordan’s with candy and he stuffed mine with makeup and marshmallow squares. The house smelled so good, like pine from the tree, and I had my favorite pumpkin waffle candle burning every day.

My mother-in-law flew in and it was really nice to have her here. She flew in on Christmas Eve and we went to the farmer’s market at the Grove. The farmer’s market there is so cool. There are so many different foods and drinks from around the world and we had such a good time that we decided that would be our new tradition, to go there every Christmas Eve. We went to bed early and woke up Christmas morning to open gifts and then I started cooking. I cook A LOT on holidays lolol.

We ate too much and stayed in our pjs all day and it was fantastic. For New Years we were going to go out, but we ended up staying in our pjs and drinking wine and we were proud of ourselves for staying up to watch the ball drop! Lol. It’s weird living in LA though, because the ball drops in NYC and we watched it at nine, it was strange.

Now it’s January and it’s 2017! I’m working on finishing The Spring Girls and I’m so in love with this book, I can’t wait for you to read it. I’m leaving for Italy this Friday and I can’t wait to see my Italian readers and eat delicious Italian food for a week.

If you made it this far, you deserve a medal haha. This is basically what these posts will be, me rambling about random things. This was fun, see you next time! Xo.