Tag Archives: Holidays

Christmas Dinner at GoGo’s

Dec
31

Posted by: Maggie

After Eleanor’s afternoon nap, a very late afternoon nap (remember we had slept in until 10am on Christmas morning), we headed over to GoGo’s house for Christmas dinner and more presents. Now, the problem with GoGo’s house is that, at night, it’s pretty dimly lit. Which is nice mood lighting for a dinner party and especially for a holiday party, but does not make for good photography. At least not with my current camera lens. You can see a sample of what a shot sans flash looks like below. Not so good! So I rarely get any good photos at family events at GoGo’s house. That is, until now!

Enter my Christmas gift from GoGo!

A brand new 50mm lens! And let there be light!

Or at least a lens that is capable of capturing the available light! A very very merry Christmas to me! Thanks Mommy! I love you! Best present ever! I mean aside from the camera itself!

So now I can take all sorts of pictures at GoGo’s house. Like the family playing some weird board game.

Look at how nice and shallow that depth of field is when I’m shooting with a wide open 1.8! Oh so nice!

My Brother In-Law Christian

Elliott

Elliott and his Girlfriend Lilly

And I can take lovely shots of my beautiful little girl!

Notice the hand moving in quick to both stop her from drinking any drop of the alcoholic punch that had been in that glass and to stop her from smashing the glass on the floor.

And the photos of candles! Oh my goodness the candles!

So pretty! And the absolutely gorgeous dinner table my mother set!

I just can’t get enough of these votive holders!

Oh my goodness with that crazy gorgeous shallow depth of field. It looks like I could just take this photo and smear it on a french baguette and eat it up like some delicious triple creme brie! Oh, it is just so creamy! Wow, now I’m super hungry! Somebody get me some cheese!

And the food and drink photos I can take!

Okay, so I didn’t take enough food photos, but I was super hungry. Since I was getting over the flu, I had barely eaten anything all week.

The Family at Dinner

Emmett and GoGo

Emmett and William (doesn’t he look amazed at that steaming plate of carrots Emmett is holding)

Lilly

Maria (or MoMo to Eleanor)

Do you see that face Christian (far right) is giving Eleanor? Ha! She was probably making a mess with her dinner.

After Dinner we moved on to presents!

By the way, have you noticed how good looking my husband is? Well, back off ladies! He’s taken! And you’d have to fight Eleanor for his attention anyway, and really that is just not a fight any of us can win!

I’m not so bad looking myself. Even with that uncomfortable “take the picture already” look on my face. Also, even though I badly need my hair cut, as I can barely see through my bangs (don’t worry I have an appointment with Stacy today!)

And we make a damn fine looking baby, who already poses like a model! What great instincts! And, I know, she needs a trim too!

And that was Christmas! Don’t forget you have until midnight tonight PST to enter our big giveaway, click this link to read about the prize and how to enter! Good luck everyone! I can’t wait to pick a winner!

Christmas Eve 2009

Dec
29

Posted by: Maggie

As I mentioned last week, I was sick with the flu. Not fun. I started feeling better on Christmas Eve, but Josh was just starting to feel sick. So, we decided to skip the festivities with my extended family. Neither of us was feeling up to chatting with everyone while watching Eleanor, and I didn’t want us to get all of my cousin’s little ones sick. My dad was hosting this year, so we waited until the extended family had left and headed over to his place for Christmas Eve gifts with the family. Since my parents are divorced we do Christmas Eve with my Dad, Christmas Morning at home, and Christmas dinner with my mom. It works out that Josh’s family is Jewish, I don’t think I could handle any more Christmas events.

Eleanor wore her lovely holiday dress and headband that my friend Megan bought her for her birthday. You may remember it from our Hanukkah post. We threw on some white tights to keep her warm and I found some matching sparkly shoes at Target, which we gave her as a Hanukkah gift. I hope you approve Megan!

You’ll notice that Eleanor went straight for the plate of cookies. She proceeded to lick the icing off of several and then run around like a crazy person. Neither Josh nor I had the energy to stop her. And, whatever, it’s Christmas, she can have sweets at Christmas. We’re not monsters, after all. At least not at Christmas.

And that was Christmas Eve. Pretty relaxed. You can tell by the way, my brother Emmett is lying on the floor. Super relaxed!

Tomorrow we’ll skip the usual Wordless Wednesday and have some words along with photos of Christmas morning!

Holiday Pre-Partying

Dec
28

Posted by: Maggie

Last Sunday night we had Andrew & Amy and Betsy over for a holiday movie and baking party. The whole thing was Andrew’s idea, by the way, and thank you Andrew! It was a great idea! We all had so much fun. This is one of my favorite parts of the holidays, getting to spend time with our closest friends.

I wanted to bake my favorite holiday cookie, chewy chocolate gingerbread cookies, but the dough needs to be refrigerated for several hours before baking so I spent the morning making all of the dough so that once the guests arrived all we would have to do was to roll it into balls and roll them in sugar before putting them in the oven.

Here are my ingredients. I actually make this cookie from scratch, and real scratch, not my new ” from scratch.”

Of course I didn’t actually take any pictures of the party itself, because as I’ve said I tend to forget about my camera when I’m hosting a party. And to be honest I was pretty drunk through the entire party. I hadn’t eaten much that day, so all it really took was a glass of wine just after Andrew and Amy arrived.

At some point I had a second glass of wine and then while Amy, Josh and Besty watched Love, Actually (such a great holiday movie, always makes me cry) Andrew and I worked on the cookies and some very very boozy eggnog that he had made himself. It was actually really good eggnog with tons of Brandy. So I was pretty good and drunk through the entire party. We had a great time just talking and laughing and occasionally watching parts of the movie. I spent half of the night just listening to Betsy and Andrew talk which was so much fun for me. It felt just like old times when the three of us were best friends in high school spending every Friday night watching movies at Betsy’s house. Oh, the good old days!

Anyway, it was a fun little party and luckily Amy was there with her camera. Here is the link to the photos she put up in her SmugMug gallery. If she posts about it herself later, I’ll update this post with a link.

Update: Here’s the link to Amy’s post about the party!

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