Our FIrst CHristmas and New Year!

Well, we first want to thank everybody for their wonderful CHristmas cards and phone calls. It was wonderful to hear from everyone and we are glad everyone enjoyed their holidays.
T and I began sending out our Thank You cards (finally) and hope everyone will receive them soon. My sister and my mom both had a birthday over the holidays and the Clinton extended family was blessed with a new beautiful baby girl on my sister's birthday. Happy New Year, Madison!
Our Christmas was fantastic. We really got to celebrate the reason for the season. I have saved many Christmas sermon CDs from SOuthbrook, our old church, and listened to them while cooking, doing work, and cleaning, or just relaxing. We also attended a Christmas Eve service at a local church and it was beautifully decorated, we sang a few God-centered Christmas songs, and we're blessed to hear another great sermon.
T and I blended our family Christmas traditions together and were able to create some new traditions. My family likes to open gifts Christmas Eve, eat Mom's canned green beans and thumbprint cookies, help out a local family through gifts and/or a donation and watch a few Christmas movies. T's family have stockings hung by the chimney with care, open presents on Christmas Day, eat goose and cranberries (which is now a new favorite for me) and place Baby Jesus in his trough in our Nativity to make sure we remember why we are celebrating.
T really out did herself when she created our Christmas Eve, Christmas Morning, and Christmas Evening meals. Our new tradition for Christmas Eve dinner is fondu. We marinated chicken, steak, and shrimp and combined those with mushrooms and potatoes and had at least 7 different dipping sauces. It was delicious. We also have new Christmas drink traditions. We have December 23rd, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day drinks. All different. All tasty.
I have a tradition of my own that I got to invite T to be apart of this year. Each year on Christmas Eve, I take a walk close to midnight. I usually take along a walkman or ipod so I can listen to Christmas music, a sermon or a Christmas story from the radio or from a CD. T and I got bundled up and put on our Ipods and took a walk under a nice starry sky and headed for a place to sit and enjoy. It was beautiful and inspiring, not to mention relaxing and connecting. I was glad to introduce my wife to something I enjoy so much. (I do miss my walks under the lights along Troy's levee, though.)
T and I spent all day Christmas Eve cutting up vegetables and getting things ready for Christmas Day. That night, T and I talked to my folks back home and my sister and her fiance' over the phone, and we opened some of our presents to each other while we talked. It was almost (I said almost) like we were there. When we woke up on Christmas, it was snowing. We opened our presents in our stockings first (another T tradition) and then went to put our already prepared breakfast casserole together (our new tradition). It was delicious. It contained diced potatoes, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, peppers, shredded cheeses, and eggs in a pie shell. I'm drooling just thinking about it.
After we ate, we opened our gifts from T's family and then our gifts to each other. Naturally, we then cleaned up all the wrapping paper and boxes and proceeded to play with our new toys for the rest of the day.
Christmas dinner was a masterpiece, as well. We cooked a goose, which turned out wonderfully, ate wild rice stuffing with cranberries, greenbeans, cranberry salsa (a recipe from a colleague that is now a new favorite of ours), scalloped potatoes, and wine while listening to Josh Groban. For dessert, T made something that I hope becomes another Clinton tradition.
We spent the next few days enjoying each other's company, playing with our new toys, and cleaning up the house. We also got ready for New Years. We planned a snowboarding trip to Keystone. We made reservations at a little bed and breakfast outside of town and got our season passes and gear on base. We drove down Sunday and boarded all day. I took a lesson while T carved up the slopes. After my lesson, T took me up a green run where we found out that other skiers apparently do not like it when people cut them off or continually fall in front of them. Who new? It had been snowing and windy all day but the real snow hit when we left the slopes. A blizzard hit the area and 2,500 people became stranded. They had to open up the area schools and rec center to accomodate all the people caught in the storm.
We left there and checked into the bed and breakfast. It was nice and the owners were very polite. We ended up meeting a nice young couple there who became our Yahtzee and card game buddies. We boarded the next day, I fell twice as much and T did not have a good day, either. That night we celebrated New Year's Eve with our new friends and ate pizza from Pizza hut that tasted like Pizza Butt. (We ordered out because the B & B owners were having a party upstairs and we didn't want to lose our parking spaces to any of their guests , plus it was cold and crazy outside.) The man in the couple told us that he was majoring in philosophy, theology, and biology in college because he wanted to find out the meaning of life and what it was all about. I found this fascinating and allowed him to share all he had discovered so far. It pretty much came down to this, "There is a God and he is not Him." I wanted to tell him that he probably could have come to that realization with a dollar and twenty-five cents in late charges from his local library instead of $20,000 dollars a year from his local college but hey, each walks his own way and each creates their own project. (Project is my new word for "life" that I got from a magazine article from "O.")
Tuesday we all went shopping at the local outlet malls and found great bargains. Everything was up to 70-80% off. Since I'm cheap (or thrifty as I like to call it), I thought we had died and gone to heaven. We found some really nice things and enjoyed a apple pie dipped apple that T and I and our new friends found to be quite tasty. (It was a green apple dipped in caramel, white chocolate, graham crackers and sugar. Again, I'm drooling over here.)
We played some more Yahtzee and went to so we could rest up for our last day on the slopes. (I feel so cool just saying the word "slopes.")
Our last day, I took another lesson and finally went down the green run better prepared and more confident. We both had a blast and a bumper crop of bruises and blisters but it was all well worth it. We're back at home now getting ready for work to start back up and plan for new snowboarding weekends.
That's all from us. We had a very blessed and enjoyable holiday. We hope everybody had a fun and safe holiday, too. Stay in touch.
Oh, by the way, I finished the 4th Harry Potter book a couple of days ago. It was over 700 pages long. I picked up the first book over Thanksgiving break and haven't stopped reading them. They are well crafted, well written books and would recommend them to anyone. I cannot get over how complex and sophistaced they are, yet how addictive and easy to read they are. I can't wait to read the next one.