Christmasing with our Cousins!

A lot of things happened in the week or so before we went on vacation.  The holidays were upon us and there was a lot of celebrating to be had.  We didn't get to post about all of our excitement, so I figured we catch up a little bit today.

I grew up celebrating December 25th for a number of reasons - one of them being that my brother was born on December 25th so we always celebrated it!  Also because my great grandmother Josephine celebrated Christmas and then so did my Grandma and then so did my mom - to some extent...

I have fond memories of getting presents from Santa on Christmas morning - it wasn't a huge deal... just something we did usually just with our little nuclear family.

For way too many reasons that I am not going to go into here, I had decided a long time ago that I wanted to marry a nice Jewish boy and never celebrate Christmas in our house...

I ended up marrying a wonderful and complicated Episcopalian black woman whose family is from the West Indies... how's that for following through on one's life plan...

But before we got married, we agreed on a few things.  One of those things was that we would raise our children Jewish and we would never celebrate Christmas in our house.

And that we have done.  We are raising Jonah & Vera in a Jewish home and they are Jewish.  We do not celebrate Christmas in our house.  We visit Grandma and Grandpa and celebrate Christmas with them at their house - the PERFECT solution!

Jonah knows that Santa does not visit our house because we are Jewish.  You can imagine that he was excited to visit Grandma and Grandpa - since you know - Santa was going to visit their house!

We spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Grandma and Grandpa and bunch of our cousins! And, as an added treat, my very good friends also stopped by with their little boy - it was great to see them too! Then we drove back on the day after Christmas to see Uncle D, Auntie Nee and more cousins in Baltimore for some more Christmasing...

Basically, we ate way to much good food and way too many treats!  Th kids received way too many gifts.  But it was good to spend time with family.  Jonah & Vera LOVED laughing, playing, running and celebrating with all their cousins in New York and Baltimore! 

The drive up to NY was easy and great.... the drive back was long and so not so fun - but it was worth it for the kids to get to have such a good time with their relatives!

Hope everyone made it through all the holidays in good shape and you haven't given up on those New Year's intentions/resolutions yet!

PS: We also did a preChristmas photo shoot with our Baltimore cousins (we do this annually) and we gave the pictures to grandma and grandpa for their anniversary - which it turns out is just a few days after Christmas!  I enclose a few pictures from that as well!