christmas

 I never posted anything about christmas! this was our first christmas as a married couple. i remember last christmas when i was still able to be a part of luke's family festivities, but i wasn't a member of the family yet (luke and i were talking seriously about getting engaged though). so this was my first official christmas as a facer and part of the family, and luke an official part of mine!
I love christmas time, all the family is together, and we do a lot of fun activities, such as....

-gingerbread house making (ours roof was sliding off the whole time, and made it a little messy!)
-a special FHE with some neighbors (we had a puppet show and the neighborhood kids were mostly involved and i was laughing because they were being so silly! most entertaining puppet show by far, and made me excited to when we have kids of our own and can do fun things like this!)
-Christmas caroling (not all of us were excited about this, mostly me. i just feel awkward, but we ended up having fun! i mostly liked visiting with the people for a couple minutes afterwards:).
-christmas eve festivities  (my mom's side of the family always gets together and we have a late lunch, games, visiting, and a gift exchange! i look forward to this every year! we have a large family, iso i love being with all my cousins and aunts and uncles! unfortunately, luke had to work on this day since this is one of the busiest times for apple, so he didn't get to come).

luke and i decided that we would have our own little gift exchange christmas morning and then we would go to our families afterwards. our christmas morning ended up being about 5 hours of just opening presents! best christmas ever! we woke up super early to open our gifts, because my family gets up at 6:30am to open gifts...so i believe we got up at 5:30am. after going to my parents we went to luke's parents house. we both felt super grateful for all the nice things we got! i don't think either one of us has ever received so many presents.

we also went surfing! and i even went out in the water. i've been such a baby this winter, i have hardly gone in the water because i get SOOO cold! and i was absolutely freezing christmas day, but i still went!

 i made some stockings for us

luke's mom, mindy, made us an advent calendar. 25 stockings, and each one had 2 pieces of chocolate and a scripture in it for us to read every day. we loved it!

 our very first tree!!!

our instagram photo

christmas morning at our little apartment!