Christmas Eve and Christmas

We really simplified this year- which made Christmas so much more enjoyable. We started Christmas eve off with making gingerbread cookies, which filled our little house with the smells of Christmas. Maddie LOVED helping me roll out the dough, and although it took me 20 minutes to clean up the mess, it was worth it :)



I then started making a cake for our Christmas eve dinner- and here are the results. I'm not that great at icing cakes obviously- I should have cut it around like Ace of Cakes to make it more even, but what matters, is that this cake was DELICIOUS! White cake with berry filling. YUM.


For our Christmas Eve dinner, Steve made his traditional ceviche-- shrimp, avocado, lemon, cilantro, tomato... so yummy!


We are lovers of lamb, so we bought a roast...


Really simple green beans..
Our little family... my dad came for Christmas!!

Oh- here are how the cookies ended up looking like! They were so good.

My plate.

For Christmas, we went the simple and healthy route and did a fruit platter with some of our favorite fruits:

We relaxed for most of the day (Maddie took a 4 hour nap?) and then went over to our house in construction, and opened/assembled Maddie's big present-- a kitchen and fridge from Land of Nod. It is sooo cute- and she loves it.



MERRY CHRISTMAS!