Christmas 2018

Ginny's life for 20+ hours

Christmas was a little different than in years past. Since moving in 2002, we have only spent one Christmas Day not at our house, and that was when we were in Hawaii in 2004 for our tenth wedding anniversary trip. Most years, we have a full house, which I love!

However, C's mom had a heart attack a few months back and while it was mild and she has recovered beautifully, it changed his parents' travel plans for the holidays. They have spent almost every Christmas at our house, but needed to stay close to home this year, so we decided to go up to Canada to celebrate with them at their house! I love them so incredibly much and they are absolutely my second set of parents! Since C is an only child, we didn't want them spending Christmas alone!

We drove up on December 22 – it's about a ten-hour drive – and drove back home on Christmas Day. We had a wonderful time with them and Ginny was a champ for all of those hours in the car! We took her down to the park where we used to go for picnics when we were in high school, but it was cold and windy, so she wasn't too happy with that experience!

of course we stopped at Primanti Bros.

One super fun thing we did involved hockey – the Maple Leafs were hosting the Red Wings on December 23. We looked into tickets, but we are fairly choosy when it comes to where we sit at NHL games. Baseball is a different story – when we visited all of the MLB stadiums, we sometimes bought really great seats, but we were just as happy with upper deck cheap seats. Not so for hockey, because where you sit makes a HUGE difference, so if we are going to go to a game, we want good seats. We were able to find really good seats, but we were in no way interested in shelling out $700 for them, so we made alternate plans and went downtown to watch the game at the big sports bar across the street from the arena. In addition to countless other TVs, there is a 39-foot screen that makes you feel like you're at a movie theater! We were lucky to snag a reservation for right before puck drop, and when we were seated, I feel like we had a perfect view of the game. What a super fun experience to be surrounded by other Leafs fans! The service and the food was also amazing and it made for a great night – with one caveat: we left the game with five minutes to go in the third period to get ahead of the traffic since the Leafs were losing 4-3. Well, wouldn't you know they tied it up with less than ten seconds left in the game and then ended up winning in overtime! We were pretty annoyed with ourselves for not staying until the very end!

We celebrated with C's parents on Christmas Eve and then got up early on Christmas Day to drive home for two reasons: 1) we thought C was going to have to work on the 26^th and 2) we thought the border would not be busy due to the holiday. We were incorrect on both counts! C did not end up working due to the government shutdown and the border was super busy. Oh well! We were able to enjoy a Christmas dinner of Sbarro pizza at a rest stop on PA. :)

Christmas Eve baking

I practically consider it treason to drink
anything other than Tim Hortons coffee
while in Canada, but no locations
were open on Christmas 

Ginny keeping an eye on the traffic at the border

seems representative of the government shutdown

Christmas Dinner

We celebrated with my family later that week, so even though it was pretty unorthodox for us, this Christmas was still filled with wonderful memories!

my nephew Max

my nephew Kaz

Happy Tails to you!