Christmas 2016

Get ready for photo overload!  Before diving into the new year & all the fun posts that come with that, I want to recap our Christmas!

Christmas Eve started out with lots of cooking and loading up at our house and then we trekked over to my aunt & uncle's for our Mann family Christmas!

Secret Santa

Our 3rd married Christmas!

My little brother & grandfather.  Two good looking and good men!

So much love in this picture.

After lunch, gifts and visiting with my Dad's side, we headed over to Dad & Darlene's to do Christmas dinner and gifts with them.

Stockings by the new fireplace!  (They just renovated & I love how the fireplace turned out)

They crack me up.

We were so spoiled!  

We ended the night at our Christmas Eve church service which was so beautiful.   It's easy to get swept up in the commercial side of Christmas but it's so important to remember and celebrate the real reason for the season!

On Christmas morning, we woke up and exchanged stockings and spent the first part of the day cooking and enjoying the morning together.

On Christmas afternoon, we went to my grandparents to eat dinner and exchange gifts with them.  These three guys make my heart happy!

Delicious dinner!

Love these 4 so much!

Christmas 2016 was a great one!!   I do not take for granted how lucky I am to have these amazing people in my life.  Hope you had a wonderful Christmas celebrating with your family!

2016 Thanksgiving Weekend

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!!  We had a great holiday and then spent 3 days working like crazy to get our house ready for Christmas.  We're hosting our first holiday event this weekend so everything needed to be decorated, organized and wrapped so that the house would be in order.  It was a whirlwind but we're almost finished!

I'm so thankful for this family of mine.  It has been a great year and a hard one at times too but I'm so thankful that I can always count on these four. 

My favorite turkey!

Family time!

We play games at all of our family holidays and this year my cousin Stacy brought Pie in the Face!  SO.MUCH.FUN.  I got pied on the first spin lol!

These three refused to play and when we finally convinced them...

Not one of them got pied!!! What a crock!   These two little turkeys loved watching & playing with us!

After all that fun, we headed over to Jared's parents to watch the Cowboys game with his dad!  Thankful for another Cowboys victory (10-1 is a good place to be)!

While all the crazies were out shopping the next day, we were putting up Christmas lights!  It was a lot of work but Jared did such a good job! 

Working hard even after dark!  Can't wait to show you all how it turned out in a separate post soon!

On Sunday, my brother was baptized at church!  My brother has been my hero, best friend and partner in crime my whole life and I'm so thankful that I can now call him my official brother in Christ as well. 

Proud big sister!

After church, we had a belated birthday lunch for me and I chose the Pizza Hut buffet :)   I don't let myself indulge in it very often but it sounded good and it was the birthday girl's choice!

My beautiful Granny!

Grandad snuck out to the car before we could get a picture with him!

Thankful.

These lovely ladies joined us too!  My cousin Kennedy, Dyl's girlfriend Lauren and my Aunt Lavonda.  She cracks me up!

Grandad might have gotten out of the restaurant picture but I still snagged one when we went to their house after!

I played the piano for years and spent countless hours practicing with my grandmother on her piano.  She decided to go ahead and give it to me so my guys were awesome and moved it to our house for me after lunch.

Love having a family heirloom in our house now :)  I'll show a final photo of how we decorated the piano for Christmas in my Christmas Home Décor post coming soon!

I'll be recapping our Texas trip the rest of the week and then will dive into Christmas everything next week!  I've got my hands full finishing the décor, completing my wrapping and meal prepping for this weekend so if you need me this week look for the scratched hands from all the trees and garland, the blur running by in the grocery store or Hobby Lobby or the elf by the Christmas tree in the wee hours watching Hallmark and wrapping away :)

Christmas 2015

Christmas 2015 was oh so great!

The week leading up to Christmas we drove around town to look at lights...

made our gingerbread house!

Had Dyl & Lauren over for our annual cookie making!

Loved sitting on the couch and looking at our pretty tree every night!  Side note: NEVER buy wrapping paper with glitter.  The red paper looks like it has glitter but it's not really glitter, the silver is ALL glitter!  I'm pretty sure my family and I will be finding glitter in our houses for months to come!!

On Christmas Eve Eve, I went to my grandparents and had a yummy pancake dinner and then helped my Grandmother prep for Christmas morning!

Christmas Eve!  Christmas Eve morning/afternoon we spent with my immediate family.  So much fun eating and opening presents! 

My first time making Christmas Punch - so yummy!

Christmas Eve night the whole Mann clan gets together and it's always a blast!  Cole helping Grandad go sit down...how sweet :)

My Secret Santa knows me well :)

This year we played a game where you had to try to open a gift with oven mitts while the next person was rolling dice to get doubles and make it their turn!

Harder than it looks but SOOOO much fun!  There were wrapped boxes inside the boxes so it kept getting harder!

Winner!

Christmas morning!  We slept in a little, opened stockings and had a pancake breakfast!

Christmas afternoon was spent celebrating with my brother and grandparents!

So much fun & too much to eat :)

Christmas night by our tree!  We were worn out from the celebrations.  We watched a movie and looked at our gifts again! 

The day after Christmas, Darlene & I ventured out to find decorations, paper, etc for next year!  I found so many great deals on indoor and outdoor stuff!  It was crazier out than I expected (like 100 people outside Hobby Lobby and running through the aisles with shopping carts kind of crazy)!

I can't wait to decorate next year and show you all!  We decorated before but this year we'll be adding another tree and a lot more décor throughout the house!

Sunday was full of church, football, Christmas with Jared's immediate family and then an early bedtime! 


We had so much fun celebrating with everyone and enjoying the real reason for the season!

We're working on taking all our decorations down this week and getting our house back in order. I love Christmas but when it's over, I'm over it and ready for our house to be clean and organized again! 

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!