Happy Holidays 2011!

Happy Holidays! I hope that you're all having a beautiful time at home with your family and friends, enjoying the day off of work, or the month or so off of school if you're in uni! I'm having a great time in NY with my family, and I was really excited to see my friends as well. I haven't seen everyone yet, but I am looking forward to spending lots of time with people I love :)

 Like M and R! If you can't tell from the picture, M is a curmudgeonly old grouch, and R is a wonderful beauty of a friend!

Obviously, seeing my family is an upside to the holidays as well. It's been a while since I got to come back, as it's a seven/eight hour trip from Philadelphia to upstate NY, so we're all quite happy to see each other. Hopefully that novelty doesn't quite wear off by the time I leave ;)

 Jennie gave us all elf hats!

Jennie and Pierce were able to come over for Christmas Eve yesterday, and while Pierce was able to come again today after spending the morning at his mother's, Jennie is either en route to or currently in New Orleans, so we did some of our presents yesterday, along with Christmas dinner... hence why I'm typing this "post Christmas" blog on Christmas.

 Some of us were happier to wear them than others

Notice the male family members' inability to pull off the 'look' quite as well as their female counterparts. They're quite jealous, as you can see. Don't worry, though -- they were re-gruntled when we gave them a bunch of books each!

Merry Christmas from the M-L ladies!

It's not our fault we're glamorous! I hope your Christmas/time with loved ones is grand, and I certainly hope you got a day to lounge around the house, eating mashed potatoes and wearing bright pink chinese silk pajamas (that's the only way to spend Christmas, after all)! Merry Christmas!

This is Philadelphia, the city in which I currently reside and study. It's pretty fabulous. In case you can't tell from the green tree in the bottom left corner next to City Hall, this picture is actually from October, not December. Whoops! I'd left dead batteries in my camera now for two months' time!

This is my boyfriend and I, standing on the third floor of Macy's in front of the Christmas tree (which is enormous and prettiful, and pictures do it, obviously, no justice. I'm fairly confident that some God of festivities mandated that pictures of things like parties and Christmas trees can never look nearly as cool as the real things were), having a great time listening to the daily Christmas-time organ concert at noon.

Is your country dirty? Don't worry, the British Empire will clean it up! I don't remember where this place is, but I found it highly amusing, hence, it is being shared.

Happy Holidays!

Christmas time city life!

It's getting to be Christmas time, and I now have only one person left on my shopping list. Trouble maker, I know. What business do they have needing presents at Christmas? ugh.

This is what people turn into when they want Christmas presents. Yeah, that is supposed to be a child.

But it does mean that I got to go downtown today to try to cross them off the list (and I did get it down from two people to only one!). I went with Beth, and we had a wonderful time of marvelousness. Before shopping, we stopped at Macy's and visited Dicken's village.

Macy's does Christmas. They do Christmas with lights and toys and an organ, like a boss.

It was kind of awesome, even though it was full of moving dolls and they were all incredibly creepy.

SEE??

We had a fantastic photo taken with Santa, which I believe is the first picture of myself with Santa ever, but... for seventeen dollars for a single print, we did not walk away with a copy. It was a great picture, though, and when Beth told Santa that she wanted to do well on her exams, he told her he could come up with some Ritalin for her. Coolest Santa ever.

Instead, here's a picture of us in front of a house in Dicken's Village, taken by a random kind soul, with creeper moving doll in the background.

By the way, the lights show and organ concert at Macy's are both cool and also rather well-attended. I really liked the couples laying on the ground.

This picture is actually from yesterday, when I saw the lights and heard the concert with Gabe.

Of course, we may have gotten deterred by pretty dresses on the way down the escalators... yeah. We really, really did. And also by soft sweaters. But those were about $140 a pop, so... And really, trying on sweaters is not nearly as fabulous as trying on dresses. This dress was over the one hundred dollar mark, and taking a picture of it gave me an excuse to terrorize Beth.

A nicer room mate would not be nearly as much fun.

Then, we actually went shopping for other people, and beth got her finger all pastel-y... and, of course, got my face all pastel'd as well.

Either I got roughed up living in the bad part of town, or my room mate can't avoid touching colored things.

And theeeen, we went to the Christmas Village. Potato latkes are really good, and so are broccoli-cheese puffs, and apple cider. Yum :)

See? We love/are capable of standing next to each other!

The Christmas Village is a really cool place, full of expensive ornaments and scarves and jewelry. And also they have lots of German people running food booths (or selling ornaments. I don't think I realized until visiting the Christmas Village how perfectly "Christmas" and "German" fit together. I never really thought about how many Christmas traditions are German in origin, I suppose.)

I don't know if we can blame this one on the Germans, though...

On our way back to the subway, we passed a hotel, where there was a guy roasting chestnuts! Whoa! On an open fire! I've never seen such madness!

And that's what's really, really cool about living in a city.