After traveling the last two Christmases, we decided to stay in Palo Alto this year. Now that we have room for guests, Jamma was able to stay with us for the holiday and fun ensued. The stockings were hung … as they say …
The first thing on the agenda was to make a rhubarb pie with the rhubarb Rhonda had sent as a surprise for Jamma. It turned out pretty good!
On our first night together, Jamma gave us three bags of Nicaraguan coffee (yum!) and three of her dad’s harmonicas which the boys loved.
They are very cool. Here’s a closeup of one of them.
After dinner we went to see the Fantasy of Lights in Los Gatos. It’s a huge park, all done up with different light displays. Here are a couple of examples.
Finn wasn’t feeling very good, but Ezra had a good time, especially when he stood up through the sun roof.
The next day we took Jamma for a tour of X. They had another fun winter display with the car in the lobby.
After the tour we went to lunch at our favorite Mexican place in Redwood City.
We had our annual building of the Trader Joe’s gingerbread house.
This time, Ezra added some gory details of severed limbs (although, nice use of sprinkles, I’d say).
And we watched Elf on the big screen.
I’d gotten a puzzle for us to do in our down time. It started off fine, but ended up just being another thing for the cats to play with. Or lay on as the case may be.
We had a lovely dinner for Christmas Eve …
… and we were ready for the big day. I snapped a couple of pictures in the calm before the storm.
It was a very Kings-y Christmas and the boys were pretty happy with their new hats, socks, and jerseys.
They got lots of other stuff too. The cats were just happy that all the boxes that had been torturing them were now empty.
On the day after Christmas, Ezra holed up in his room building his LEGO VW van.
Later in the afternoon, we had visitors — Mike, Carla, Emily, Kendra, and Paige! Super fun to see everyone. I didn’t take very many pictures, but I snapped this one when Mike borrowed Paige’s reading glasses to see something on her phone. Wow, we are all getting old!
The boys roped their cousins into playing a game of Exploding Kittens.
And before they left I remembered to get a cousin shot.
I also got one of Jamma and the boys.
And that’s it for my pictures. That night I took Jamma over to Oakland so she could stay there overnight for her very early flight back to Belize. We had a great visit!