It may be the charm of the twinkle lights and the glow from the champagne but I think this past Christmas Break is one of the nicest I’ve ever experienced. Please indulge me while I post the highlights here, both so that I can share them with you and so that I can remember them myself in the cold winter days ahead.

• Quiet mornings by the fire with a good book and a hot cup of coffee while Dale slept in. I’m an early riser by nature but it’s much nicer to get up early and relax than to get up early and go to work. I finished 4 books over break – The Orphan Train, The Invention of Wings, We Need to Talk About Kevin and Dear Committee Members – and I started a 5th, TransAtlantic.
• A fun family game night with tacos and the Wii. We had lots of laughs and Dale remains the Wii bowling champ of the family.
• Card games with Dale. While I consistently best him at Quiddler he beat me so resoundingly at Phase 10 that I may never play that with him again. Okay, I’m kidding, but he seriously left him in the dust with that one.
• A wonderful Saturday afternoon with Jo-Ann. She went to the quilt shop with me and we had lunch at my favorite Mexican place. It was so nice to just be with her and not deal with the pressures of work or Kiwanis or kids but just good hanging out time.
• Buying a new car! This wasn’t really something we planned to do over break but things fell into place at just the right time and Dale is now the proud driver of a 2015 Subaru Forester.
• Shopping with Dale. We spent a fun afternoon at my favorite mall. He got the watch he’s been wanting, I picked up a few things at Sephora, he got some boots and I got a calendar for my office. We ended the afternoon with snacks and drinks at the bar at the Cheesecake Factory.
• New Year’s Eve with our friends Tom & Anne and Shawn & Jo-Ann. This is the 3rd year we’ve spent the holiday together and we had a blast. We started with dinner at our house – everyone brought something but I have to say that the tenderloin of beef that I cooked was the star of the show – and then we went to a local restaurant for a New Year’s Eve party. We saw other townies there and there were hats and noisemakers and very good (perhaps too good, ahem) martinis.
• Dinners out with Dale. We splurged on oysters one night and then went to a new-to-us restaurant on another. We chatted with a couple at the bar on that particular night and they paid our entire tab when they left. It was amazing to be on the receiving end of that random act of kindness.
• Movies. We went to see Unbroken and at home we watched This Is Where I Leave You and We Need to Talk About Kevin. All 3 are adaptations of books I have read and I have to say I could never be a screenwriter and be the one who decides what to leave out and what to leave in. Of the three, Unbroken was definitely the best.
• Time for quilting. I have the pieces cut out for a new quilt for the den. It’s blues and grays and whites and I think it’s going to be lovely.
• Time for knitting. I finished a pair of socks and started new socks for Dale. I think 2015 is going to be the year of knitting socks for others.
• Starting my One Little Word 2015 journal. I’ve watched the video and read through the January prompt and I’m thinking on it before I journal anything. So many of my friends are participating in it this year and I’m really looking forward to seeing not only how my word plays out but theirs as well.

It was a relaxing time of nesting and rejuvenating. I feel like there was the perfect balance of want-tos and have-tos, of time alone and time with Dale and time with friends. I’ll be holding on to these memories for a long, long time.