Our Christmas 2012

This was probably the best Christmas of my life. I think it may be tied with the year Blake and I woke up to tents by the Christmas tree with our presents inside. I got a Beauty and the Beast one, he got Toy Story. I got a typewriter that year too. Anyway.

We had a fantastic Christmas! One thing that was so great was that our days off came right after a weekend, so it ended up being 5 amazing days in a row. I'll just tell you what we did with pics. LOTS of pics. All from my phone because this is as good as it gets right now with blogging. And I understand if you don't want to read all the way to the bottom, but I didn't want to leave anything out!

No Christmas decoration pics today...maybe tomorrow. I know, I know...everyone is done with Christmas but I want to post it for my own future reference. :)

I went Black Friday shopping with my sis in law Anna and her friend Rachel and we had a BLAST. We went at 11:00 Thursday so that was an ideal situation for me. I'm definitely more of a night owl than an early riser. 

At Target the line was WAY too long so we hid our stuff and came back later. I kept wondering if I should feel bad about that or not. Oh well.

Jordan topping our real tree with the star. :)

We had a fun night with my BFF Ashlee and her fam at my parents' house.

(Yes, I'm kinda short. 5'4''. I don't think I'm short until I'm around my friends/Jordan's friends. Their average height is pretty tall.)

How crazy pretty are my parents' Christmas lights? My mom is a master Christmas decorator.

Christmas at Grandma's included her classic holiday desserts: boiled custard, banana pudding, pecan pies, and chocolate layer cake. YUMMMM.

My sweet cousin Kayla. :) Who was also one of my flower girls!

Grandma & Grandaddy's tree ALWAYS has colored lights. 

My grandparents are the coolest.

We always play outside in the yard at Grandma's. This is probably one of the 9 times in my life that I've played with a soccer ball. The rest of those times were in PE.

With my man at Grandma's!

We had our annual AshRitArah Steel Club Christmas shindig (it's a club we started in 9th grade), and looky what I got from Sarah!! We said YES!!

I didn't take any pictures at Jordan's 6th annual Christmas Whobilation at our house. :( It was SO FUN and so much better than cramming everyone into our little apartment. All night I kept thinking howww did we do that last year??

Then we had another Christmas party at our house with some of my best friends & their men. (Can you tell we had a LOT of events this Christmas?)

We celebrated my bro's 21st birthday in the midst of all this Christmas hullabaloo. My mom had a very talented 13 year old make a Hobbit cake for Blake. Yeah, it was impressive. 

We then made our way to Greensboro (Jordan's hometown) for the weekend before Christmas. We were seriously SO GIDDY about going and hanging out with the Shelley side of the family. Mainly because we were ALL together! Jordan's brother Josh and his family got to come from Memphis. For the past 5 or so Christmases they've been in China so this was a HUGE treat.

We had the traditional night of looking at Christmas lights, eating downtown, and going to Krispy Kreme.

I got hot chocolate instead of a donut of course. I just had a really weird moment because it underlined the word donut for me to tell me it was misspelled. I had no idea that it's actually spelled doughnut. Even though it says that in the picture above. Further evidence of the fact that I hate them and would rather eat anything else.

One of the best things about Christmas this year was being reunited with our precious nephew Harvey! He is 19 months and at such a fun age. We LOVED playing with him and being constantly entertained by him.

We went to Jordan's friend Dillon's house for some dinner and Just Dance. The guys gave me their best blue steel pose.

These three handsome brothers played O Come All Ye Faithful at church that Sunday morning and it was beautiful as expected. Jordan on guitar, Josh on piano, Joseph on violin. They are SO talented.

And then that Sunday night at church ALL of the Shelley kids sang Go Tell it On the Mountain together. I was nervous since I hadn't sung in front of people since um..my senior play in high school? But I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the Shelley ensemble.

We also went caroling as a family that night which was really special. I pray that it was as much of a blessing to the houses we visited as it was to me!

Here's me & my beautiful sister in law Danielle. You can check out her blog for more Harvey adorableness.

Jordan made Harvey an extremely cool play board thing for Christmas. I love this picture of them so hard.

That smile and that sweater just kills me with the cuteness.

We had the Shelley Christmas morning on Christmas Eve. I got some Pampered Chef stoneware and other wonderful gifts. I was even in tears due to a gift from Joseph. He gave everyone picture frames that he made that said "Thank You For Your Example" and a letter from him inside. He said lots of nice things about me that are mostly fabricated because I'm not that cool. But I was very touched that he thinks so. :)

We then headed over to Jordan's Granma's house for a gathering of 32 Shelleys. Or 33? I'm still not sure.

She has a tree filled with all the initials and pictures of her grandchildren. I LOVE this.

Close up of me & Jordan!

Yeah, that's a lot of stockings. This was the first time ALL of the Shelleys have been able to get together in...a long time? Ever? 

Isn't that a nice little tree?

But wait. Look closer.

Bahahaha. That's the man I married.

Jordan got a giant tool box which was the perfect size for Harvey to fit in!

Uncle Jordan, will you put on my new shoes?

Jordan got a set of his favorite thing to drink out of: jars with handles. We were so excited to have these for our house. :)

Jordan sold his car, "The White Blur", to his cousin Luke. We had a ceremony. It's making its way up to Wisconsin as I type this. Hopefully.

After the Christmas Eve festivities, we made our way back to Raleigh. We watched Home Alone 2 (we had already watched the first one a few days prior) and wrapped gifts because we had wrapped ZERO gifts beforehand. There was literally not a spare minute to do so before that night. We sat back to back so we couldn't see what the other was doing. :)

Christmas morning we woke up and exchanged gifts just us two. :) I gave Jordan a Dewalt miter saw that he had been longing for. He was a little happy. I actually picked it out without his help (I did text his friend to make sure I was in the right ballpark). I was so pumped to give it to him, I could barely sleep Christmas Eve! Clearly I will be a basketcase when I give our future kids gifts.

Jordan surprised me with a tennis racket, balls, and lessons from him. He must truly love me, because I have attempted tennis only one time in my life and it was not pretty. Picture me swinging with a huge softball style upper cut. Yeah. We're going to try to play tomorrow so we'll see how that goes...

Jordan made us breakfast which we ate on our nice dishes and toasted sparkling grape juice with our little crystal glasses. :) We did that last year too, and it was one of my favorite things about Christmas. 

Then we went over to my parents' house and had the Hamilton Christmas morning. 

(Can I just insert here that having THREE Christmases is really awesome.)

After a fabulous time with my fam and playing with our new toys, we went to visit my other grandparents at the nursing home they are in.

My Papa got this nifty cash present. How cute is that??

We love this man!!

The only picture of us on Christmas Day 2012!

These are the movies I got for Christmas. Such perfect choices for me.

The day after Christmas (Boxing Day?) we had my family and Jordan's family over for lunch. This was seriously a dream come true. Jordan and I were BEAMING the entire time because it was exactly what we wanted ever since we got the house.

Jordan and some of the fellas grilling some yummy burgers!

We played one of our new games - Reverse Charades. SO. FUN. It's our new favorite group game. And also the story behind these ridiculous looking pictures.

It was tough to say goodbye to the Memphians and our nephew. But we were so happy to have spent such quality time with them!

So now that Christmas is over? Jordan has moved on to some intense table making! YAYYY

Nothing like a picture of my manly man crafting me a table to make me wanna go pounce on him. Sorry that was TMI. But hey, we're married.

Hope you had a fantastic Christmas! If you made it to the end of this post, I congratulate you! 

Murder Mystery Party!

For Jordan's birthday we had SUCH a fun party for him. We'd been wanting to do a murder mystery dinner party, but didn't have the space in our one bedroom apartment. We decided to ask my kind parental unit if we could use their lovely abode, and they obliged! It was the PERFECT place for it.
Okay maybe I should explain what a murder mystery party is for those of you who don't know. Here's how it goes.
1. There's a theme. Ours was the murder of a millionaire.
2. You buy a packet online that comes with everything you need to play. It can be a small group or a large group, there are ones for all sizes. We had 17 people and I think that any more than that would have been difficult.
*Ours was from www.nightofmystery.com*
3. Everyone gets a character ahead of time. You are the only one who really knows about your character - your life, background, relationships with other characters, secrets, etc. You learn all about your character and come to the party as your character. And dressed like him/her of course. :)
4. When you get to the party, you mingle with the other characters and receive your first envelope. In that envelope there are objectives to complete and questions you should ask others, along with some fake money. You may find out more about yourself and your secrets too. You can use the money to bribe people to tell you secrets, or to keep yours quiet!
5. After dinner and when everyone completes what their first envelopes told them to do, you receive a second envelope. In our party this was after the reading of the millionaire's will (why we were gathered together). There may also be another murder! It probably depends on the party.
6. The second envelope tells you if you are the murderer. If you're not the murderer, it tells you more info about yourself and others they may help you figure it out. 
7. You spend the rest of the party trying to figure out who did it and why! It is SO fun. People got really into it. It wasn't a simple plot whatsoever. (Only 2 out of 17 figured it out at our party.) There were so many different motives and crazy characters whose stories intertwined. And it was hilarious to see our friends acting out the characters. For instance one of my best friends was my rival at the party so we were fighting the whole time. As in literally pushing each other, haha. The more you get into it, the better time you have. You can still completely play when you host it. Jordan and I had no idea who the murderer was or about anyone's secrets, even though we arranged the whole thing.   There are prizes, too! Whoever guesses the murderer right at the end gets a prize. There are also awards for Best Dressed, Best Acting, and Most Money.  Here is Jasmine Rochester and Reilly Ravish. (Also known as me and Jordan.)

And that was my prom dress from my junior year of high school, haha. Can't believe that was seven years ago!

Here is my friend Sarah whom I was referring to earlier, and her man Dane. (Neal Worthers and Jessica Rochester) You can see why Sarah won Best Dressed!

 

People were getting INTENSE about this. They kept having secret conversations in the "office" and I caught these two listening in on one. 

Here I am with my daughter Katherine. (My friend Amy.) We were snobby, obviously.

 

And of course, I can't leave out the pool boy - Fabio Fabulous. (Amy's fiance Eric.) He tied with Sarah for Best Dressed!

 

If you are throwing a murder mystery party anytime soon or want to - please don't hesitate to ask me about it! We were kinda anxious about how it would go, but it was fantastic. We definitely want to have another one. I think next time we may do a Western themed one. :)
Have you thrown any fun parties lately? I need some more good ideas - my birthday is 2 months from today!