Christmas Parties and Such

We finally went out and chopped down a Christmas tree to put up in our apartment this last week. The people who owned the lot were very nice to us. When they saw what a small tree we had, they only charged us $5 for it. Our large tree stand is overkill for it; the screws that are designed to hold the tree in place barely reach the trunk when they are screwed in all the way. It is not a perfect tree, but we like it, and it fits well in the small space we have available for it.

Friday night we went to our ward Christmas party. The party itself was...different. The theme was "Christmas with Emma and Joseph." But they did have a ginger bread house contest as well. We were told we could use any material, so we designed a card-stock paper pop-up gingerbread house.

It took us awhile to make, but we had fun with it. Gluing the "candy" pieces on took an especially long time, but we thought the results were pretty good.

Saturday evening we attended a white elephant party with a bunch of my cousins. It was pretty fun. We brought two white elephant gifts: a snowman decoration Nate got from his company party that we didn't want, and a foot massager we found at DI that looked like two large fuzzy blue slippers and vibrated when you turned it on. We both ended up with a box of See's chocolates, that obviously came from someone who didn't understand what a white elephant is. We also enjoyed seeing other people's white elephant gifts: a blow-up guitar and sparkly red hat (pictured below), an enormous pink calculator (designed for old people so they can seen the numbers better), a container of Sponge Bob shampoo accompanied by a mermaid toy that grows in water and a rubber ducky, and a reindeer toy that plays music and does a wiggly dance when turned on (pictured below) to name a few.

Unfortunately, we were late for the party since we didn't know they had closed part of the I-15 freeway. We didn't even see much to warn us of the closure. Traffic backed up for quite a ways as they narrowed the freeway down to one lane and forced you to exit, drive through the city, and then re-enter the freeway after the construction area. We took a different route home!