Christmas Time!

As you can see, we are all ready for the holiday! Our tree is accented with festive ornaments and lights and accompanied by the infamous lego train this year! Somehow over the years I have lost many pieces and had to improvise parts to make it work but it is up and running well. Our stocking are hung with care with our family's favorite holiday flick placed on repeat in the background, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

To get into the holiday spirit last week, we put on our jammies, warmed some hot cocoa, and drove around Denver looking for Christmas lights. We found a few fabulous neighboorhoods all decked out. Below we feature the houses that truly went above and beyond to show their holiday spirit.

Some of these house were truely amazing. This one here had 20 or more 15+ foot trees completely covered with lights. The gate made it sad we were not able to drive through the peoples yard and enjoy them.

To start our holiday off right, Matt got a pair of Avalanche hockey tickets from me for the game on Dec.23 against Tampa Bay Lightening. The game went into overtime and our team won in the last three min by one amazing shot.

Thanksgiving Weekend

This year we flew to southern Oregon for the Thanksgiving holiday. We enjoyed spending time with the family including my grandparents. Thanksgiving day we all gathered at my great aunt Leta's house for afternoon dinner and dessert. Friday, my mom and I woke up early, but not too early, to do some holiday shopping.

The rest of Friday our friend Chelsea drove Matt and I to Ashland for the afternoon. We walked the plaza, spent some time at Paddington's and had lunch at Alex's. Some of our favorite things. After the sun went down we stayed for the Ashland Festival of Light parade and city lights ceremony. We watched all the Occupy hippies walk down the street protesting their crazy ideas mixed with some holiday music as the whole town came out to participate. All the years we lived in Ashland we never attended the annual event for one reason or another so this was a fun treat!

Saturday we hung out with my grandparents playing dominoes and catching up from the past year. Sunday we woke up early and drove back to Ashland one last time for breakfast at our favorite early joint Brother's. We had our usual, the bagel and lox with capers plate for two. We walked the SOU campus so Matt could rekindle his time spent dedicated to his undergrad. Now that he's an alumni, we decided to see the alumni house on campus. We took a few pics, said our goodbyes, and left our memories of a moment in time behind for the next chapter of adventures.

Free Night at the Museum's

This fall we participated in Denver's annual free night at the museums. This year we explored the Botanic Gardens and the Byers-Evans House Museum. We started the evening with the Botanic Gardens being it is mainly an outside museum with sculptures placed amongst pathways of trees, plants and flower. There was few blooming flowers as the season had turned with the leaves. The gardens were organized in themed sections including an herb garden and a Japanese garden beautifully accented with colored lights along pathways winding in and out of each other.

As we finished the outside garden's a sudden burst of rain flooded the grounds just in time for us to explore the atrium. Unfortunately, only part of the atrium was open for the evening.
Below is a picture of me in the garden's atrium next to a tree with one lonely fruit. It was a tough tree as we watched a dozen people come in from the rain and tug on this piece of fruit and yet it remained attached to he tree. Not sure how long it would last!

With the rain receding, we decided to head over to the Beyer-Evan's house. A historic house built in 1883 for William Byers, the editor of Denver's first newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News. In 1889, he sold the house to the son of John Evans (the second governor of the Colorado territory), William Evans, who was president of the Denver Tramway Company. The house remains in tact in the middle of the city and looks as it did over 100 years ago. It has been said the house is haunted so we were curious to see for ourselves. It was a very cool house but we determined by the end that it's not haunted, at least not for us and one visit was all we will ever need from that museum.