Christmas 2020 recap

Hi friends! Happy Monday and welcome to the blur between Christmas and New Years, where time doesn’t really matter. I personally love this week as a chance to regroup and clean after Christmas festivities – our house is a toy store explosion – and also plan for the upcoming year. While I’m not setting my hopes or productivity goals TOO high for 2021 (lesson learned from last year), I’m definitely taking time to assess and plan what I can.

I hope that my friends who were celebrating last week enjoyed a wonderful Christmas! Ours was more key than previous years, but still absolutely lovely. Instead of having the huge Christmas Eve dinner with my dad’s entire side of the family, it was much smaller.

My stepmom set up beautiful outdoor seating areas so we could be spaced out and the kiddos could play on their playground. The weather was perfection!! We ate Chinese takeout, desserts, opened gifts, chatted around the outdoor fireplace, and my dad set up a race track on his putting green so the boys could race remote controlled cars. It was pretty hilarious.

We headed back home and I prepped the egg casserole and cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning. The girls put out their treats for Santa and the Pilot and I drank wine and watched Christmas Vacation before calling it a night. (Because we were home so much more this year, we had all of the gifts wrapped and hidden so all we had to do was set everything out!! Usually we’re up until crazy hours of the mornings prepping and assembling, and this year was a pleasant surprise. I’m going to try and do this again for future years!)

A huge Christmas gift: the girls let us sleep until 8am. They were watching TV in the playroom and playing, SO excited to open their gifts, but didn’t wake us up. I can’t even handle their sweetness.

We listened to Christmas music while they opened their gifts, and then mom, nana, my stepdad, Trevor, Uncle E and our cousins were over just in time for breakfast: cinnamon rolls, egg casserole, tamales, picadillo, and ALL the sweet treats. I set out a tray of cookies and peppermint bark, and madre brought over cookies, coffee cake, and grammies (I’ve had a hundred this weekend).

My fave pics from the day:

Mrs. Claus and Christmas Carol

P the explorer,

the Pilot, making his famous eggnog,

and Livi with her favorite: Uncle Jesse.

The kids spent the afternoon playing with their toys and we sat around eating sweets and watching movies. I caught a quick ride on the Peloton and we made dinner: roasted lemon and garlic asparagus, steak (a mix of NY strip and filet mignon), BBQ salmon, roasted potatoes, and mulled wine in the slow cooker.

The rest of the weekend was spent taking down decorations (wah), cleaning up, and taking a break for some time at the pool since it was 75 degrees (and the pool is heated). I’m back in the swing of things today, but before I sign off to get Fit Guides sent, I wanted to share the winner of my favorite things giveaway!

Instagram comment #9: @ksfitzpatrick

I’ll be getting all of the goodies on the way this week and stay tuned for more giveaway fun 🙂

THANK YOU so much to those of you who entered and those of you who completed the annual survey. I’m so excited to plan 2021 content using your amazing requests and feedback. I’m working on a special challenge for January based on many of your survey responses, current struggles (and things I’ve experienced myself!), so I’ll have the details on how to join next Monday. If you want to make sure you get the info first, be sure to sign up for my newsletter here.

Have a wonderful day and I’ll see ya soon!

xo

Gina