Christmas

We just got back from our trip to California for Christmas. Last Thursday (the 20th) we headed off to the airport around 1:30 PM. After a huge weather related delay at the airport we left SLC (at about 9:00 PM). We didn't arrive at my parents' house in Folsom until 1:00AM MST! We could have driven in less time! Besides that, the trip was pretty fun. We really enjoyed spending a whole week doing nothing important. We played a lot of ping-pong, computer games, board games, and outdoor games. On Christmas Eve, they opened the zoo to visitors for free, so we visited the Sacramento Zoo.

Penguins

Red Pandas

Graffias

Ostrich and Zebra

Chimpanzee

Lemur

Rebecca going down the slide in a park across the street from the zoo with our neice McKenzie.

We also visited the Jelly Belly Factory and In-n-Out Burger. We took a turn making dinner for the whole family and made some gingerbread cookies as well. My favorite holiday dessert though, was the Peppermint Dazzler. With a name like that, it's hard not to like. It's a frozen dessert with a graham cracker crust, followed by a layer of creamy chocolate, then a layer of whipped cream with marshmallows and finally a topping of crushed peppermint candies. Hmmm-mmmm!



Another fun part of Christmas this year was our gift giving trickery. We got my brother Timothy a computer game called Peggle that we really like. We wanted to get him excited about it and at least familiar with the game before Christmas day so he would understand what it was we were getting him. So, before Christmas day, we showed him the trial version of the game. He really liked it and even started hinting to us that it would be a good Christmas present. We pretended to be disappointed saying we had already gotten him a Christmas present. It worked better than we could have imagined. It was the most popular present that anyone got!