Happy, happy Christmas friends! I hope you had as good a one as we did. Would you like a tree-by-tree breakdown of our adventures? Of course you would!

First up, the tree at the Richardson airport. Ooo, YWG is fancy these days!

I got to enjoy the fanciness twice: once flying in with my munchkins and again two days later when I picked up The Husband. At 12:30 am – but no complaints, since Air Canada *almost* didn’t let him past Calgary, so we’ll call it a win.

Next up, my parents’ tree:

(Plus bonus Christmas village!)

Oh such fun. There was cookie decorating and game-playing (that ultimate Canadian game aka “Sorry”) and play-doh and cousins galore.

And, of course, the Vikings game plus eating. So much eating.

Alright, over to you, in-laws:

So pretty! And such fun familyness. More games, more cousins, and more eating.

And SNOW!! We got a for-reals blizzard with over a foot of snow. Much to the happiness of the children. And my brother-in-law, the snowblowing champion.

Next up, BFF time. Here’s the view from our framily Christmas Day gathering:

(LOL – including napping girl.)

More friends! More games! More eating! (And yet, still not tired of it.)

And I got to visit my kitty cat mug:

(I’ve been drinking tea out of one of these mugs for about 15 years now. There’s usually one in my hands and one in my BFF’s hands. One very sad Christmas, many years ago, that BFF lent me my kitty cat mug to keep with me. That mug and her love and prayers kept me going through many hard nights thankyouJesusamen. Happily, the sad times ended and our mugs were reunited. And now it waits patiently for my annual visits.)

Another BFF (because I’m crazy #blessed like that):

This beauty belongs to 1/3 of the NYC crew – lovely, yes? Also lovely was hanging out. And games. And eating. (Apparently there is a “Christmas template” that everyone I know follows.)

And, to The Boy’s great delight – backyard hockey!

The Boy was desperate to do some Canadian skating. So much so that he packed his ice skates in his carry-on bag. Which displaced a ton of clothes, so he ended up having only two pairs of pants. One of which was too small (not my fault – he’s growing ridiculously quickly these days – I can’t keep up. Plus he’s still wearing shorts most days, so who knew?), so we all got quite familiar with his remaining pair.

#priorities, right?

Thank you families and framilies! You were, as always, too good to us. Your trees were gorgeous, your food was delicious, and most of all, your hearts and hugs were ginormous. Much, much love.

It’s that time, friends! The time of year where I set my out-of-office message, use up the last fresh veggies in the fridge, and yell at the kids to make sure they’ve downloaded enough movies. It’s “Home for Christmas” time!

But first, per annual Chez PM tradition, our family Christmas.

Our first Christmas stateside, we realized the folly of schlepping all of our gifts North so we could open them on “real” Christmas, only to schlepp them all back. So the date for this one floats – it’s “the night before the first family member leaves for Canada.”

The menu is the same every year – fettuccine alfredo (I cheated this year and bought pasta instead of making it) and whatever greens I can force them to eat/are left in the fridge. I make sure to have second helpings, mostly just to troll the anxious would-be present-openers.

We’re doing a minimalist Christmas this year, in part inspired by the massive success of last year’s nomadic adventure. That there is the sum total of gifts bought by us this year.

(Hey Manitobans, spoiler alert: no presents from us this year. Four flights home costs decidedly more than two tanks of gas + a pit stop at the StaMart in Fargo, so our presence is our present this year.)

And since our kids have reached the age of “cash please,” the actual opening of presents was short and sweet.

The Husband got a couple of bottles of his favourite sour ale from Cascade Brewery. He looks at it longingly every time we pass it at the store, but it’s got a pretty steep price, so he sighs and keeps walking.

The Girl got – wait for it – a subscription to the “Pickles of the Month” club.

And The Boy got a subscription to the “Potato Chips of the Month” club.

And *I* got a subscription to some kind of weekly snack delivery.

(LOL – can you tell that I gave The Husband carte blanche on gift purchasing this year?)

It’s actually quite awesome. I *love* getting comestibles as gifts since it’s often something you really like but can never justify, plus once it’s enjoyed, you don’t have to worry about finding a place to store it. And with subscriptions, we’ll all get a monthly box of awesomeness to prolong the happiness. Plus pickles!

Different this year was our family dispersing to their separate activities immediately after presents. We tried to float a family movie night, but no one could agree on National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation vs A Christmas Story. And then The Girl said, “no offense, but I’m going to be spending alllll week with you guys. I’d rather be by myself for one last night.”

(Yep, we’ve got teenagers.)

No worries – we WILL be spending all week together! We’ve got family gatherings and framily gatherings (i.e. the friends that ARE family) and cousin dates and coworker happy hours on the agenda. But also lots of downtime planned for reading by the fire and drinking Pepsi and napping.

AND I’m hitting the ground running this year. Look what I remembered!

I’ll be hitting that Canadian border FULLY documented, thank you very much. And I won’t spend Christmas having nightmares about being turned back at the US border and prolonging the separation between me and my belongings. Oh, and I’m NOT leaving for Christmas break from one house only to head back to a different house across the country. Why, it’s downright simple this year!

Happy Christmas week, friends! May your desk be quiet on your last afternoon in the office, may you stumble upon 2-Litre Pepsis for 99 cents, and may your advent longings be amply met.

Proof that Portland gets snow:

(For your viewing pleasure – my neighbour’s lights. The house flashes like a spaceship and the dinosaur’s tail moves. And there’s a palm tree. Because Portland.)

We got an inch of snow yesterday and the city has officially lost its mind. Traffic gridlocked and then stopped. People were stuck on highways for hours. There was peeing in cups. Children got stranded on school buses.

(Don’t mock them too hard. No sand/salt trucks + hills + all-season tires = a polished skating rink. I wouldn’t drive out there even with my winter tires.)

School’s cancelled again. And even The Husband gets a snow day – his office is shuttered and everyone’s been told to stay home.

Alas, for those of us who already work from home and have a major software release breathing down their necks, all this means is that I have to type so furiously I can ignore the smell of popcorn while the fam watches their Alien movie marathon.

(No complaints. We’re together and safe, the heat and lights are on, and the fridge is full. And our cups are blessedly pee free.)

Guess where I went this weekend?!

NOWHERE!!

It was *so* lovely! It’s been ages since I had a weekend all to myself. And no, zero complaints about all the jet-setting lately. But given my introvert and homebody tendencies, three trips in one month has me feeling uncomfortably close to this guy:

And it wasn’t the quietest lead-up to the weekend either. On Monday we went to a concert.

(Why yes, we went to a concert the night after returning from NYC. That was across town. That STARTED at 9 pm. There are *very* few bands that would ever merit that kind of superhuman effort from me. Fortunately, Whitehorse is one of them.)

Oh man, these guys. So, so good. I’ve been following them since before they were together and whenever they come on the ol’ CBC, I ratchet up the volume. And oh man, what a fun venue.

The Doug Fir Lounge is basically like our old Minneapolis basement(complete with wood paneling). You literally have to go downstairs to find this cozy spot. And we totally lucked out – there were maybe 35 people there? Yeah – Monday night, Canadian band, threat of snow – it was pretty sparse. But look what happened!

Do I look a little derpy? That’s cuz I AM A LITTLE DERPY CUZ I’M TOTALLY FAN-GIRLING BECAUSE I’M TOTALLY CHATTING WITH ONE OF MY FAVOURITE BANDS AFTER THE SHOW NOBIGDEAL! While proudly wearing my CBC sweater, natch (which one of the other 35 audience members totally complimented).

So tired. So worth it.

Tuesday night wasn’t much better on the relaxing front, because we had another concert. Starring this guy:

(Can you find him? He’s the one in the middle looking SUPER enthused.)

Here he is in all his mumbling glory:

Did I love seeing my baby up there singing Christmas songs? Yes! Did I love that it was a total bait and switch and what I *thought* was a cute little middle school concert ended up being a concert extravaganza with three guest choirs from the high school PLUS audience participation PLUS intermission PLUS all the *real* middle school choirs? (Turns out The Boy is actually just in a music appreciation class and for some reason he had to kit up in black pants and a white shirt to sing TWO songs along with a cast of thousands at the very end of a TWO HOUR CONCERT).

Grrr.

Wednesday night, my usual “OMG this week was crazy it’s time for tea and a book” night ended up being errandpalooza – The Girl needs new glasses and I had to hit the grocery store because the entire city was battening down the hatches for SNOWPOCALYPSE!!

Oh yeah. This was totally my deck a few hours into the major weather warnings. But, given a bit of time, Mother Nature delivered:

Yes, ‘Tobans and ‘Sotans. I know that’s hardly real snow. I know you’re laughing. I was laughing too. BUT! the snow was swiftly followed by hours and hours of freezing rain and a temperature that refused to budge above zero.

And so, my weekend ended up being SUPER relaxed! The Husband and The Girl’s Thursday night Phantogram concert? Cancelled. Our Friday night dinner with folks from church? Cancelled. School? Cancelled. For two days. The Husband’s commute? Cancelled. Our Saturday plans with friends? Cancelled.

Honestly, it was so nice. We still had power (unlike lots of folks we know) and we had a full fridge and we had ten-second commutes to our respective at-home screens. The Husband pretended he wasn’t at home on Friday and smelling me baking deliciousness and then also pretended to be surprised on Saturday by the awesome cake I brought out for his 41st birthday.

(Phew. He’s older than I again. The world rights itself on its axis.)

And now we’re all relaxed up and caked up and rejuvenated. Our window for energeticness may be short-lived, though, since they’re predicting SNOWPOCALYPSE 2.0 later this week. Eh, can’t say I’d mind a couple of days of snuggling by the fire. These last ones sure were nice!

Am I doing this right?

XOXO

Your favourite snarky West Coaster

(Most of my neighbors are from California – bet they’d like to borrow my scraper, winter tires, and heated seats.)

Enjoy your second snow day, friends! We’ve got snow/freezing rain in tomorrow’s forecast and pretty sure Portland doesn’t have any plows or sand trucks, so watch this space for Snowpocalypse 2016 updates!

Alright, I’m gonna lay this down right at the start. I lead a charmed life. A golden ticket kind of life. An I-don’t-deserve-this kind of life. Not gonna pretend otherwise. And I’m not going to tag this “#blessed” because then it gets all oogy with “why is she blessed and I’m not” and all health and wealth gospel and this is not that. I am lucky and I know it and I don’t know why full stop. Disclaimer made:

I WENT TO NEW YORK CITY!!

Oh you guys, it was so, so great! It’s all true! Everything they tell you about NYC – the crowds, the energy, the crazy people!

Just look what we got to experience! The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

An Advent scavenger hunt at The Met (The Visitation and the Annunciation).

And for all my Whovian friends:

Grand Central Station!

Central Park!

The Statue of Liberty!

The Strand bookstore!

A Broadway show!

Rockefeller Center!

Truly it all exists and it is amazing. But you want to know what’s even more amazing? These two.

That right there is 27 years of friendship, folks. And here is where I’m pulling out the “#blessed.” Because I thank Jesus all the time for these two. Because he smiled the day he put those three names on the same homeroom roster in Grade Nine. Because I cannot imagine life without these two.

We went to grade nine grad together. We went on choir trips together. We graduated together. We wrote letters (real letters!!) to keep in touch from mission trips and Bible colleges and African adventures and child-bride-teeny-apartments. We shared pee stick results.

We have cried buckets of tears, probably evenly split between tears of laughter and tears of despair. But never real despair, because we’ve always had each other.

Oh, and we’ve had these guys:

Our poor, long-suffering, forbearing, patient husbands. The ones who orchestrated this whole thing (well, they decided we needed a trip and then we planned it) and the ones who sat back while we loved on each other.

(The Husband has a bit of an advantage here in that he’s been around the whole time, but the other two are Johnny-come-latelys and are newbies with only 15 years with us. But I’m not sure The Husband counts that as any advantage since he’s had to hear the same jokes for more than a decade longer….)

We did everything together (masterfully logisticized by that tall bald one – he is the perfect guide in NYC because he’s six foot eleventeen and he sticks out in every crowd AND he can read a map/subway schedule like NOBODY’S business). We ate and drank so, so well.

We took approximately a hundred subway rides.

We posed for carefully-arranged selfies (because SOMEONE had the forethought to win a selfie stick at his work teambuilding event and I officially eat crow and yes, itwasagoodideaforyoutobringitandimsorryimadefunofyouandareyouhappynow?!

(Friends at the “Friends” building – get it?)

The occasion for this trip? Well, every single person you see in this picture is 40 years old. Yep – for three weeks after I turned 40 (I’m the baby!) and before The Husband hits 41 (he’s the old man of the bunch!), we are ALL the same age. And because I am the luckiest girl in the world, our wonderful husbands (with planning help from us) decided we needed to celebrate in style.

My heart is so, so full right now. I am lucky AND #blessed. These are the friends you pray for for your kids. These are the friends you would call at 3 am. These are the friends who hop on planes when you need them and who sit vigil beside you. These are the friends who understand your unique shorthand where one person says “home ec” and you all start cackling. These are the friends who do this:

(Like I said, our poor husbands. Pray for them. If we have our way, they’re in for at least 27 more years of this.)

Oh, and before I forget, shout out to yet another parent-trip-enabler who came to mind the munchkins while we were gone. Our very own “Uncle Buck”:

(The kids are alive and I’m not asking any questions.)

Yes, Peitricia, there is a Santa Claus. And grace and love and Jesus and kindness and far, far more love than I could ever imagine exists and it comes through the hands and feet and hearts of my girls. Love, love, triple love.

(Each) Let’s go get away… [sorry – I can’t say that without singing Nicki Minaj]

Friends! Did you all have a good Thanksgiving? Or, as they refer to it in Canada, a good Thursday?

Mine was ahMAYzing because I was on my annual escape-Black-Friday-and-usher-in-the-holiday-season-on-the-beach vacation!

(Yes. Am luckiest girl in the world. Am aware.)

For the third year in a row, The Husband and I took advantage of having no American Thanksgiving traditions to prevent us from enjoying the long weekend and headed off to St. Martin. Third time was definitely the charm – the first year it was still all new and we felt obligated to do touristy things. Last year there was the spectre of “must sell house and move across country” hanging over my head. But this year was perfect – a well-established routine, no pressure to try anything new, and an extra day to boot.

Let me show you why I love it so much! First, you wake up to blue skies and hot sun and flowers and palm trees.

Then, off to breakfast where (because we stay on the French side), you get croissants and pain au chocolat and fresh juice.

Then you saunter back to your room, apply 90 SPF sunscreen, and head off to the beach!

A short stroll later, you reach the only difficulty of the day – catching the attention of the right beach boy who will get you a good seat (it helps if you tipped well the day before).

And then you are placed and you politely request that the umbrella be moved to make sure not a single sunbeam touches your skin and then you ask for an espresso and you take out your Kindle and then ahhhhhh…..

(See how there’s a little tile with our name on it on that table? Once you’ve come for a few days and proved your worthiness, you get a reserved seat!)

Then it’s all “read a few pages” and then “stare at the ocean” and then “read a few more pages” and then “ask for a drink refill” until you take a break from all that arduousness for lunch.

(Also on the beach, because luckiest girl in the world.)

Then, when the sun starts to think about setting and the wind starts picking up and you start to get a bit cold, it’s time to pack up, bid farewell and “a demain” to the beach boy and head back to the hotel room to rest up from such a hard day.

(Made all the better with beer and French snacks. Note: That collection of bottles is not from my side of the bed. My collection was much smaller. But also contained fewer Miller Lites. [Good grief])

Second wind obtained, it’s time for dinner. There’s decent restaurants (because France) but my favourite, favourite evening is Friday.

I don’t go for the lobster party. I go for SHINE! See the smooth dude behind me with a stool and a microphone? That’s Shine and he croons the best karaoke ever.

(Sorry about my face – I’m doing that thing where you pretend you’re posing for a picture when really the person is trying to unobtrusively take a video.)

Oh, and the resort is full of feral cats! So there’s little friends hanging around your dinner table! (That actually makes it sound less cool than it is….)

And then you happily sway back to your room and your crazy-big king-sized bed that is so big you can’t even find each other and smile as you drift off knowing you get to do it all over again tomorrow.

Swoon. It really is my favourite thing. And so amazing to have a week to be just the two of us, reconnecting and relaxing and calming our spirits before the holidays. I look forward to it all year and every second I’m there is truly a dream.

Oh, and don’t you feel bad about our poor left-behind children. Shout out to my parents who came out for the week and exceeded expectations (which was possibly not that hard since we gave them only one requirement: “keep the kids alive”). Not only alive, but also a Thanksgiving feast!

Sigh. I can’t wait to go back! Only 359 more days!