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Thursday, December 22, 2011

A Happy Holiday Season in San Diego

It has been a fun and busy holiday season. It has been interesting to find our way into the Christmas spirit when it is sunny and we look out our window at rows of palm trees. Still, we have had a great time starting new traditions for our family as well as joining our extended families for their traditions. We spent Thanksgiving with Kelson's family in Escondido. We had an amazing feast and enjoyed a day of movies and time with family.  We have lot to be grateful for this year.

For our Christmas card picture, we decided to capture a little of San Diego. It may look like summer, but this picture was taken on Thanksgiving in Kelson's grandparents' garden.  Where I come from, oranges are only found at the grocery store. Picking them off a tree is so cool!

I am used to spending the day after Thanksgiving huddling around the fireplace to stay warm after wading through the snow to cut down a Christmas tree. It was a very different experience this year. We did hunt for a Christmas tree, but it was at a store, and rather than wading through snow, we were strolling down the beach at Coronado.  Sometimes, new and different things can be exciting.

The Hotel Del Coronado is amazing. I would love to go spend a night there.

We had a date night at the temple. Before we went in, we ate a picnic in the car. After we got done in the temple, we enjoyed some hot cider that I brought along in a thermos while we walked around and looked at the temple lights. They were great!

Celebrating the Christmas season at the temple was a good reminder of what we need to be focusing on at this time of year.  We are grateful for the Christmas season, which gives us a special opportunity to celebrate the birth of our Savior.

We decided to start a new tradition of making our Christmas ornaments every year. This year, we went to a paint-your-own pottery place and painted our ornaments. Kelson was proud of his snowman.

I went with a snowflake. So much fun!

Being on the water, San Diego can't just have a normal parade. Our Christmas parade was composed of boat-floats sailing around the bay. The traffic downtown was crazy, but it was worth it. Some of the boats were awesome!


After the parade, we went to a neighborhood near our house called Christmas Circle. There were several blocks of houses decked out for the holidays. We found some wonderful pockets of Christmas spirit that day.

Now, we are at home in Oregon for Christmas. I accidentally deleted all of the pictures we have taken since we got here, so the Oregon post may have to wait a couple of days. In the mean time, merry Christmas to everyone!

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