It’s that time of year again, Thanksgiving and Christmas, cooking and lengthy paid vacations. So we didn’t do anything for Halloween because we were in the process of moving, didn’t know anyone, and literally had nothing to do. But Thanksgiving and Christmas were a different story.

We continued our hotpot tradition for Thanksgiving. This was a tradition started during our first Thanksgiving as a couple living away from family. We had Thanksgiving at a friend’s house (rather than celebrating alone). Since it was only 4 of us, a full Thanksgiving spread seemed a bit much, so we opted for hot pot instead. The idea has continued to resonate with us since. A full Thanksgiving spread has yet to be worth it so we decided to do hotpot every year. It’s one of my favorite traditions now!

We also decided to do our first ‘family Christmas card’ this year since we are now married. Being that it is a ‘family card’, we of course had to include the cats in the photo (sorry, Illidan but you weren’t a part of the family at the time of the card). Overall, I feel like the picture is a good representation of us at this moment in our life.

Christmas meant that I got an entire week off of work, paid, and without digging into my PTO. But it’s also when plane tickets are crazy expensive, so we couldn’t afford to go home. We instead decided to have a small celebration together. It started with our Christmas Eve tradition (something we’ve had since our very first Christmas together when we only saw each other on Christmas Eve and spent Christmas with family). Our tradition is watching a Christmas movie while drinking hot cocoa and eating mincemeat pies. This is the first year that I made the pies from scratch though. I think I did a pretty good job though; I may have to do it again next year. Our movie this year: Die Hard of course. Yes! It IS a Christmas movie.

For Christmas day, we watched another of our favorite Christmas movies, Jingle All The Way. It’s actually the movie we watched on our very first Christmas Eve together. I also decided to make us a pretty nice meal. I made beef wellington, cranberry sauce, Yorkshire puddings, peas, gravy, and Victoria sponge cake for dessert (all from scratch). It was delicious. We popped our crackers (another of my favorite tradition), read our jokes and donned our crowns while we ate our dinner. It was really a sweet time. I think we could continue doing something similar in future years! :)