Christmas in Utah - Part 1

This year we got to spend Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa up in Utah! Now, as a rule, we don't like to do Christmas away from home, but we figured that since we didn't make it up for Thanksgiving, and since I'll be pretty busy in February (when we traditionally go up to see real winter), the sensible thing was to do the holidays in Utah! Our first activity was to get Connor his first professional haircut, and heaven knows he needed it. I've been the one to cut his hair since he was a baby, but I've never pretended to know how. So, this was a combination mercy gift and educational experience for mom. Hopefully my efforts in the future will be a little bit better!
From the first day we arrived, Connor was bugging Grandma to make "gingerbread men" with him. This was a big deal. They had to be gingerbread men, like in the story. So, Grandma explained that gingerbread was NOT the same as sugar cookie dough, and when he expressed his full understanding of that fact, she bought cookie cutters and made a batch of (mostly unspiced, for the kids' sake) homemade gingerbread. Connor came running to taste the dough, with pure joy on his face, but was extremely unimpressed. It tasted funny, he said, and he didn't like it. Soooo, Grandma put the dough in the fridge and proceeded to make another full batch of sugar cookie dough. It passed the Connor taste test, so the kids cut out the shapes, then later decorated their creations. Here they are looking proud.



Elise insisted she wanted half a bottle of sprinkles on her cookies, then decided she didn't like sprinkles, and proceeded to spend the next 20 minutes scraping them out of the frosting with her finger. Yeah, the grown-ups didn't eat many of these.

We were blessed with plenty of snow to play in, and got to go see Grandma and Grandpa's new house in the countryside (they actually closed on it while we were there!)






After Ryan joined us, a couple days before Christmas, he went with Connor and Chuck to cut a Christmas tree. My parents own property in the middle of nowhere that's covered with juniper trees, and although it was a little unconventional-looking, the little tree they picked was awesome. They unfortunately got stuck in the snow, since they made this trip during the beginnings of a blizzard (at Ryan's insistence), but they did make it out eventually.
On Christmas Eve, Ryan made our traditional Christmas Crab (here he is cracking the leftovers), and we all had the opportunity to paint wooden ornaments for the tree. Kyle and Kelli were there, and Uncle Kevin came down from Salt Lake to spend a couple days, so it was really cool to be together. It was a great Christmas Eve!