{2011 Christmas cards + a few older favorites; see anyone you know?}

Every year, on December 26th, I am ready to clear my home of any and all holiday-themed items. In doing so, I say goodbye to Christmas (at least until July when the retailers introduce it to us far too early again) and prepare for the New Year. Even though I don’t have a lot of Christmas decor, especially this year, there’s something incredibly cathartic about clearing out the old to make room for the new.

Usually, I trim holiday borders from the Christmas photos I’ve received and repurpose them as fridge art, tacking the photos to the fridge with decorative magnets. This year, I decided to do something a little different. I cut out each photo in a scrapbooky (real word? no?) fashion, affixed squares of magnet (I had some old, flat magnets and cut them up to fit the photos) to the backs of the photos with double-stick tape, and made a collage of my favorite faces. A fun little project that makes a year-round Christmas card display totally acceptable. Also, I guarantee it will make you smile whenever you walk into your kitchen.

Today was a bit of a lazy day, since the few days leading up to Christmas looked something like this:

• Frantically shopping on December 23rd for 80% of the gifts we were giving, miraculously finding everything we needed in a couple of hours, and celebrating with fajitas at our favorite Mexican food joint.
• Baking a Red Velvet Cake from scratch (because anything less would not be tolerable), having my stupid oven bake it completely unevenly, crying as it crumbled when I frosted it, and nearly throwing it against the wall out of frustration.
• Purchasing a store-bought Red Velvet Cake as a back-up (intolerable, I know!), but not having to use it because apparently adding a 2″ layer of homemade cream cheese frosting to even the worst cake in the world makes it palatable and everyone love it.
• Wrapping gifts and trying to keep the gifts belonging to opposite sides of the family from getting mixed up.
• Making the several hour drive to see our families in a Toyota Matrix laden with two dogs, a bevy of gifts, and two Red Velvet cakes.
• Enjoying two great Christmas celebrations with two wonderful families.
• Eating lots of food and experiencing lots of joy and laughter.
• Loading up the gifts we received, two muddy dogs, some Red Velvet crumbs and driving home.

We got home last night and all I did today was unpack, wash some laundry, send some emails, create aforementioned fridge collage, and make a very simple dinner. I wish I could say I felt bad about it, but is there anything better than having a day with nothing pressing to do, snuggled up on the couch watching HIMYM reruns? Maybe I’ll be able to summon more productivity tomorrow; until then, I think I’ll have another cup of peppermint tea. I hope you all had an equally lovely Christmas + day after!