A Different Christmas

How was your Christmas? I haven't caught up on my blog reading yet, so I hope to see lots of lovely time with your families and maybe even some stitching progress. Christmas here at the Paulsons was different this year as our Boise family weren't able to come up for various reasons, mostly adult kids' work schedules and the weather caused road closures! First time in about 25 years that we all weren't together and it felt really strange.

But with 7 grown children, their spouses and grandchildren, we still had a houseful on Christmas afternoon for presents and dinner. One of the funniest things was our 4-year-old Geneva giving Papa a jar of baby dill pickles for a gift. Apparently when my daughter took her shopping at the dollar store, she saw that they had groceries and immediately knew she had to get pickles for Papa, lol! I think we may have a new tradition!

Geneva and Papa eating pickles!

On Monday Matt and Mystie made homemade apple fritters for all the gang - sooooo good!! And my sister and her husband decided to drive up from Boise since the roads were good so we could watch the Boise State game against Baylor - which we lost badly, ugh! But the bright spot was having another "Christmas" since they brought up the gifts from all the family.

There's not been much stitching time with family coming and going the last week or so. But I did grab a kitted project and got it started - Victoria Sampler's Jingle Bells Xmas Tree Farm.

I've had this ready to go for YEARS so I felt like I needed to get started.

The linen is Cashel Smokey Pearl and I bought the acc pac for this one. Way back when I had even separated the threads, put them on thread drops and labeled them. In looking over the pattern, all those trees are lots of different embroidery stitches, one set of three trees is queen stitch, not really my favorite, but it does give a nice look to the design.

Well, we're heading towards the New Year holiday weekend and there will be lots of great football to watch and the Rose Parade, which I love.

Happy New Year everyone!