We Survived!

Thanksgiving went off without a hitch!  Pretty much all of the food turned out awesome, and everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy the meal.  We even got to Skype with my sister Lindsay, who spent her Thanksgiving in the Middle East (where she lives) cooking chickens for a Thanksgiving meal with all her ex-pat friends.  It was an exhausting, but good, day.

In my tiny house, we had 16 people for dinner.  We literally used every single chair Greg and I own that is not upholstered, meant for camping, or part of an outdoor picnic set.  Here's a pic of the delicious and pretty cornucopia appetizer my sister, Adrea, and I made together.  It looked beautiful and made for a great conversation piece.  We made the actual cornucopia out of breadstick dough, so the whole thing was completely edible.  This picture was taken from above, but hopefully you get the idea.

We made enough food to feed about 100 people, so we'll be eating leftovers FOREVER!

Now that we survived Thanksgiving, it's time to start prepping for Christmas...which truly is my favorite holiday.  I think we'll be hanging up Christmas lights this weekend and getting ready to set up our tree, which is being delivered to us this year, thanks to an awesome deal I found on Groupon!  :) 

My house is kind of in shambles right now.  After so many people have lived, slept, eaten, and played in it for a few days it's in desparate need of deep cleaning.  Thankfully, Greg is awesome, and has already swept most of the rooms in the house.  Last night I kept getting grossed out by the feeling of so many unknown pieces of grime sticking to my toes while I was walking around barefoot.  It made me feel like I was in a college frat house.  Which was cool when I was 20...but is absolutely NOT cool now.

Since I have turned 30 (OK, it started even earlier than that) I have become grossly intolerant of dirt being in places that it doesn't belong.  I guess I always had some kind of OCD about cleanliness, but I used to be able to brush dirt off of my feet before putting on socks and heading out the door.  Now, if my feet have dirt on them that I can feel, I absolutely MUST take a shower before I even THINK about putting on a clean pair of socks.  Brushing it off just isn't an option anymore.  I want to be clean.  You can imagine how thankful I am to have a cleaning crew coming to our house this week to get our place back into truly clean shape!

I hope all of you had an awesome holiday, and, that you're ready for the madness of Christmas preparation that will be congesting shopping malls, roadways, and supermarkets, as well as turning every radio station into a 24/7 Burl Ives marathon for the next 4 weeks.  I'm bracing myself -- hope you are too!