Hanukkah and Christmas Decor

The first night of Hanukkah fell on the Sunday after Thanksgiving this year, and the girls really wanted to get Christmas set up, so there wasn't much time to rest on our Thanksgiving laurels.  The show must go on!

We got out all the red and green boxes, and the girls worked on setting up the Christmas tree.

We found some local powered lights, and Elena was in charge of making sure they actually worked.

Both the girls helped put ornaments on the tree and nothing broke!  Hopefully we're as lucky getting everything off the tree too.

This will be Jeff and my 15th Christmas since we founded our own branch of the Goerss family.

We didn't get the village set up right away, so there was space to do the Hanukkah candles.  We learned the hard way though that Viv needs something under her menorah to catch the wax.

Even though we weren't finished doing all the decorations, the tree was done, which was enough for Pixie.  We found her enjoying the tree the next morning.

Elena was especially delighted to see her and proceeded to catch her up on the events of the past year.  The best holiday present so far though has been Elena's first Covid vaccine shot.  They had a clinic at the embassy after school, and there was definitely a festive atmosphere in the air.  She said it didn't hurt, and her only side effects were a slightly sore upper arm the next day.  She can't wait for her second shot.

We continued with our Hanukkah celebrations throughout the week, including a meal of fried food, although it was a little different this year.  We didn't have latkes, but we had fried chicken, fried rice, stir fried vegetables, and Noby revealed that she can make spring rolls from scratch, so she fried some of those up for us too.

I finally got around to setting up the village, and Jeff gave me a new building as an early Christmas present.  It's a gin distillery! The water wheel moves and everything.  It's a big hit, and it fits in really well.

We have part of the village on the dresser,

part on the card table,

and a few rebels on one of the side tables.

As you can see, it didn't take long for the toys to show up, and the annual sagas to begin.

This one though, I think is the story with the most potential ;-)

We celebrated being fully set up by watching a Christmas movie (photo courtesy of Vivian).

The Marine Ball is usually in November, but with all the things going on this year, it got delayed until December.  At first we weren't going to go, but a bunch of our friends were going, and we figured it would be fun to get dressed up.  Jeff got a suit made, and he had a shirt to match my dress, so we felt very fancy and had a good time.

We stayed overnight in the hotel which had a view of the Pavilion shopping center and a peek at one of the towers.  We had a lot of fun people watching.

The girls continued Hanukkah without us, and they were very proud that they could sing the songs all on their own.  We were home the next night for the final night of Hanukkah, and we all sat down together to enjoy the lights.

The girls have a few more days of school, and then they have three weeks off for the holidays.  It's been a great start to the holiday season, and we'll try to do some fun things to keep them busy and festive while they're off of school.