Holidays at a Backwards Glance

I'm painfully behind.  In an effort to document a great holiday I'm going to post it all in one fell swoop, chronologically.  Here goes.

Each week before Christmas we set out a gift we could give to the Savior.  We had devotionals about the gift and tried to focus our efforts to develop the Christ-like trait.  It added a nice focus throughout the whole season.

Geoff's family has a tradition of each child opening a Christmas ornament on Christmas Eve.  We've continued the tradition and over the past six years or so have focused on Danish or German ornaments.  Here are a few, with the final one being 2013's ornament.

Geoff made these ornaments one year

We walked around Temple Square one night, with about 10,000 other people.  Wow are those lights spectacular.  There is a reverence to those grounds.  We love seeing them every time we pull up to our apartment too.

Cold feet!

Our dear neighbor allows the girls to whirl around the halls in his wheelchair upon their request.  They are quite nimble!

We made the long drive to Auburn for Christmas.  Oh how it felt good to be in those beautiful hills, hearing the the birds and cows and donkeys, breathing the fresh air, staring at the vast sky with its countless stars, and seeing the endless shapes of nature!  We love our city living, but we miss our country life too.

My dear friend Cindy and I got together for a long walk on our favorite path along a canal, and then she treated me to lunch at a yummy, new restaurant that was so fresh and delicious.  We never run out of things to talk about and I'm always inspired to try new things and be a better person after being with her.  She is one of the most nurturing human beings I know and I count my lucky stars our paths crossed early on during those Auburn years.

We went to San Francisco for my birthday.  I love that city, and I'm so glad we got to do our favorite Christmas things.  And the city's gift to me was weather in the 60s!

We visited our favorite chocolate shop in Switzerland right there in San Fran.

I love this picture that someone took on my phone.  It was one of those boards that you put your face into.  We didn't get a picture of the front of the board, just the behind the scenes shot.  Love it.

 We walked a tiny bit into China town.

We had lunch at my favorite place in the city, a French cafe.  This is the next best thing to being in Paris itself.

Perfect croissants and Orangina.  The girls could have stopped there and been perfectly happy.

 On to Union Square with its tree and windows and skating rink and gingerbread houses.

Writing letters to Santa in Macy's

The view of Union Square from Macy's

To the Top of the Mark for hot cocoa and spectacular views of the city

To the ice rink for some skating

Aunt Brittany was the preferred skating buddy

Because it wouldn't be totally abnormal for blogger to tell me at the end of this long post that it couldn't post so many pictures, I'm going to stop here and continue in another post.