More Christmas Celebrations!

As we typically do, we had a great Christmas morning with our family and woke up early to read the Christmas story, eat some Monkey Bread, and open stockings and gifts.  These snow caps with lights were a big hit from the stockings this year!

Tara also was loving this gift certificate for Guard and Grace, which is a super upscale steak restaurant in downtown Denver that was dubbed "The best restaurant meal I have ever had" by some of our good friends.  I guess we will be checking it out ourselves!

In the early afternoon, we drove over to Tara's mom's house and met her side of the family to repeat the morning's festivities.  We always have a great time there and the kids have fun with their aunt and uncle and cousins and all sorts of madness and shenanigans that follow.

Christmas w/ Brent's Family

It isn't that often that we get my mom's entire side of the family together, but we did manage to accomplish that for an early Christmas celebration!  Jackie and Karl and the cousins drove down to our house from Granby, while my mom and Bob and Mike and Michelle flew in from Washington and California respectively. 

We gathered around in our smallish living room and enjoyed a nice meal and conversations.  It was great to see everyone and have some time catching up.

Work Christmas Party?

This was our attempt at salvaging what turned into mostly a nightmare of a night!  Every year, my work throws a Christmas party and it is usually held downtown Denver at a nice hotel ballroom.  That was the case again this year and we dressed in our finest ballroom attire and started the drive down to the Hyatt downtown.  What we were met with was the craziest traffic I have ever seen and there was solid gridlock in every direction once you turned off the highway.

The final three blocks to the hotel took us almost 40 minutes to finally get to the turn to the Valet parking for the hotel.  Much to our surprise, when we made the turn we were greeted with "Parking Lot Full" sign in front of the hotel.  This meant that we had to venture back out to the absolute madness on the streets to a backup lot near the Denver Center for Performing Arts.  Another 30 minutes went by to make the mile and a half journey over there only to find the exact same issue with the parking lot being full!

Our third option was the Colorado Convention Center which took another 15 minutes to get over to and when we finally got into the parking lot, we locked eyes with a 20 person line just to register your car on the automated parking meter.  That was the last straw for us and we bailed on the entire prospect.  Since we were all dressed up, though, we decided to head to a restaurant of our choosing and skip the party and expensive, free meal outright.  The real challenge was finding anything that would take us at 7 pm on a Saturday night.  In the end, we went to a restaurant in a nearby nice hotel and at least tried to make a fun evening out of it.  At least the company was good...but the Christmas Party venue gets a thumbs down for my vote!

Christmas Concert at CU

Tara and I have always loved the CU Christmas Concert.  I think we enjoy the choir and band components equally.  We also love Macky Auditorium in all its regal splendor...such a great venue! It's also quite shocking that this would have been the very first time that Gavin and Gage had joined us, but that appears to be the case.

 They were looking pretty fancy and had a great time!  Each Christmas, we listen to the CD version of the concert and were so happy for them to finally get a personal taste of it.

Christmas Tree Time

Once again, Tara and the boys head up our annual tree decorating festivities while I take pictures of the progress.  King Soopers continues to deliver economical, solid trees year after year...so we are thankful for that.  Shown above, Gage is taking the first shift helping get up the lights.

Gavin came and helped with the ornaments after the lights were handled.  We will forgive his Wyoming sweatshirt and whatever is happening with his hair as we are glad to have his involvement getting ready for this season.

We are loving the new stocking holders we got last year.  Here they are with our hanging stockings.  We have them split out wide so we can still use the fireplace before Christmas morning.

 Here is one final picture of the decorating crew all together.  Great job decorating the tree this year team!