The Quintal Family Christmas

On Christmas Eve, David and I attended his extended family's Christmas party. After we ate delicious food, we played a highly entertaining gift exchange game. We each brought homemade gifts to give to one another, and took turns picking out gifts to unwrap and steal. David's grandma made a U of U quilt, which quickly became the coveted item by everyone in the room but me. :) David made the joke that, if he got the quilt, he'd be welcome to sleep under it as much as he wanted to on the couch.

After unwrapping our Christmas pajamas at my parent's house, we went back to David's parents' to unwrap our Christmas gifts from them. There were two surprises of the night. For those of you who don't know, David's favorite Christmas movie is "A Christmas Story." He watches it at least half-a-dozen times in the course of the month of December and loves every minute of it. Knowing this full well, his younger brother, Michael, gave him a Red Rider BB Gun. Can you tell David's absolutely thrilled?

The following is the next surprise, the larger one, in my opinion. Larry and Ruth, my in-laws, had already given us a generous chunk off our rent for December, which I assumed to be our Christmas present; not so! They gave us a new computer!

After the unwrapping of presents was complete, the boys quickly headed out into the below-freezing temperatures to try out David's new gun (to Ruth and I yelling, "You''ll shoot your eye out!"). They even climbed over the dog fence to spray paint a nice black target in the snow. Having never shot a gun of any kind in my life before, I decided to give it a go as well.

When Larry told me I looked just like Sarah Palin, however, I promptly put the gun down and went back inside.

The Fredrickson Family Christmas

After eating dinner and playing games with David's extended family, he and I went to my parents' house to unwrap our Christmas pajamas.

After opening gifts with David's family, we returned the following morning to have Christmas with my family. My mom made Christmas quiche and wonderfully yummy cinnamon pull-apart bread.

Every year my mom sets up a treasure hunt that has us all tearing through the house in search of clues and hidden presents. I hope that she realizes that she'll be doing this until the day she dies. We have done it every year but one, when she erroneously assumed that perhaps Jared and I had gotten too old and considered it childish; silly woman. :) Anyway, all morning long Jared had been complaining that he had been hearing a mouse in his bedroom. As Jared has faulty hearing at best (most teenagers do), nobody really paid him much attention - until I opened my chocolate orange at the end of the hunt to discover the orange foil completely gone and the orange itself covered in tiny bite marks.

Jared, finally vindicated, spent the afternoon repeatedly saying, "I told you so!" Well, at least the mouse had a good Christmas, too.

Our Talented Cat

Whilst decorating the Christmas tree (which we never did finish decorating, sadly), David and I discovered the incredible musical abilities of one of our cats, Chloe. In case you're wondering, no, David was not squeezing or otherwise forcing the cat to speak, and she did this three times before I had the sense to film it.

Christmas Cookies

One of the Christmas traditions that I am attempting to start is the decorating of Christmas cookies. So, armed with dough, cookie cutters, and sprinkles, David and I joined my family at their house for a night filled with sugar and Christmas spirit.

Little did you know that David is extremely adept at decorating cookies, although he likes to decorate them before they go into the oven. In an impressive display of neat-fingeredness coupled with a rare amount of patience, he proceeded to produce the following works of art:

Unfortunately, David and I ended up cutting, baking, and decorating the majority of the cookies - apparently my parents and brother didn't understand that this was meant to involve full family participation. As it was, my mother lent her decorating skills to the task, my father ate the dough, and Jared lay on the couch in a state of characteristic teenage semi-consciousness. Oh well, better luck next year.

Temple Square

Around the middle of December, David and I went downtown to see the lights on Temple Square. While always gloriously beautiful, they pulled out all the stops this year and made the display larger and more diverse than ever before.

In previous years, this beautiful white stone nativity scene has occupied a single spot on the lawn; this year, Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were placed in the middle of the reflecting pool directly in front of the temple, with the shepherds and wise men placed on either side of the pool on the grass.

One new addition (I should say hundreds of new additions) were these painstakingly beautiful luminaries. They were placed on the low walls surrounding the gardens, and each said Merry Christmas in a different language. Others were purely decorative, like the one below. In addition to the paper luminaries, there were dozens of metal ones as well, each showing different scenes from Christ's life.

The area around the Church Office Building was also included in the display this year. About a dozen nativity scenes were placed on various bits of lawn, each representing a different culture. The trees were all still characteristically covered in lights from root to tip, but they functioned this year as a backdrop instead of a focal point. The cultural nativities were my personal favorite. Besides representing the increasing diversity present in the Church and its worldwide growth, they carried a message of openness and acceptance, in essence saying that the Church acknowledges that the birth of the Savior was an incredible gift to the entire world, meant to benefit every individual, regardless of culture or religion. It was a beautiful message, and one that I personally hope the Church continues to spread.

Let it Snow

David and I have been living up Emigration Canyon with his parents since May of last year, and it's been working out wonderfully so far. It's really nice because it stayed at least 10 degrees cooler up here during the summer, the leaves actually started changing color in September (when they're supposed to, in my mind), and we're pretty much immune to the nasty inversions the Salt Lake valley gets in the winter. What I was not prepared for, however, was the snow. At the beginning of December, it snowed about 2 feet at our house!

I had never seen this much snow outside a ski resort in my life! All of the snow up here has definitely made driving an adventure. David works in Park City, and Parley's Canyon rarely gets plowed decently, so he takes the Jeep up there most of the time, which leaves me the 2-door, 4-cylinder Yaris to go down the canyon. I have spun out more times than I care to admit, and have probably thoroughly annoyed all of the other canyon residents lucky enough to have 4-wheel drive who are also just trying to get to work. Oh well - I go 20 miles per hour and drive in second gear and do just fine.

Halloween 2009

Yes, yes, I realize that it's January, but I just got these pictures (finally!) onto my computer and wanted to post them!

Anyway, David and I hosted a Halloween party in October, for which we made mountains of food and decorated the house like mad. Halloween is tied with Christmas for David's favorite holiday, simply because he gets to decorate the house. :) Here are a few pictures from our party:

I tried out a lot of Halloween crafts this year, and one of the ones I loved the best were these pumpkin candles. They're surprisingly easy to make - you simply use a drill to hollow out the middle of the pumpkin and drop a small tea light inside. I loved them because they looked cool, and David loved them because he got to make a craft using a drill.

David and I like to dress up as a couple, and this year we were Cleopatra and Marc Antony. With a lot of help from my mom, I made both our costumes, and we were the self-appointed winners of our own contest. :)

For food, we made double chocolate chip cookies with Reese's Pieces, witch's fingers, caramel pecan twists, chocolate noodle spiders, 7-layer dip, and swamp water punch.

We're attempting to make this an annual tradition for our friends, and also to make the parties themselves so fabulous that no one will dare not come! We definitely had a better turnout this year than last, when three people total came, and at different times. Since we're not in Provo this year, several of our friends who couldn't make it down to Utah county made it up the canyon.