December 24th couldn't have come any faster.  It seemed like finals had just ended it wasn't nearly cold enough, but before we knew it, Uncle Dave's family came knocking at our door for Christmas Eve dinner.   We dined at the heirloom table with the traditional ham, funeral potatoes, homemade rolls and reunion salad.  The kids performed a Nativity skit {Wow, they are different than me, Kendall, Rachel, and Paige at that age.  While we argued over who got to be Mary and tried to put in our best abilities with singing and everything, they fought over who got to be the sheep, and then Adam wouldn't quit whining about how we wouldn't let him paraphrase Luke 2.  When he accidentily stepped on Megan's foot, we thought that she was pretending to give birth before we realized that she wasn't acting.} and we, like every year, opened up and put on brandnew PJs.
That night, Bryan and I videochatted so we could open our presents together.  I gave him tickets to see the Imagine Dragons concert, and he gave me a beautiful bracelet with my first initial and a frame with fifteen of our cutest pictures {that my mother has since been showing off to all of her lady friends to gawk over}.  Totes adorbs?  Yes!  Is this something I am definitely gonna have to keep for the future to gaze at whenever I'm feeling lonely?  M-hmmm, you betcha!  Thank you honey!
  Oh, and we can't forget how one of those clumsy reindeer accidentily kicked Sophie's window!  Haha.
  Christmas morning, my door flew open at 6 AM sharp.  I was quite disoriented, and it took my awhile to realize why the heck Olivia had was jittering at my bedside.  But we all gathered at the stairs for the traditional Christmas morning photo, gave Dad the time to set up the camcorder, and then the kids booked it to the living room to see what Santa brought.  I was very happy to get some art supplies {the fin-tip pen allows some of my new pieces to look more comicbook-ish, which is really cool!}, combat boots and flipflops {they're a few inches tall, so they'll give me some height! my mom told me excitedly}, music, a purse {the first one that isn't hand-me-down from  my mother, LOL}, a WillowTree Nativity set for my collection, and some pretty Arizona turquoise earrings.  Thank you!
        We met up at the cousins' house for a yummy breakfast, and then spent of the rest of the day watching movies and, for me, drawing.  I don't think we got out of our jammies once the whole day.
          Kendall and I realized that she officially has no more Christmases left at home, and I have only one, and then we got to chat about our boyfriends-- it's been two months since her Curt left for his mission in the Philippines.  She is seriously so adorable when she talks about how she hopes it works out between them and how, if it does, they can have a summer wedding.  She misses him like crazy, which is so sad and cute and makes me dread my BF leaving in less than a year-and-a-half.  But man, what's crazy is to realize how much time has flown.  How long ago was it that Kendall told us that she planned on going to BYU medschool and being too busy to get married until she was "at least 25?"  In four months the beautiful genius blondie who has known me since she was five-months old is graduating high school and going to Beret at ASU.  THIS GIRL IS TALKING TO ME ABOUT GETTING MARRIED IN JUST 2.5 YEARS & I CAN PICTURE MYSELF GETTING MARRIED JUST AS EASILY.  What has happened to us little girls who wore princess gowns in cardboard castles and were afraid that the cucumber masks said to "make a woman look younger" that we put on each other would make us look like toddlers again? The days have flown.
        Christmas is a beautiful season.  Even if it was so hectic with school and gift-gathering, I can never forget the real reason for the holidays. It is for the miracle birth of a person who changed the course of the heavens and earth forever.  Because of Him, this wonderfully family of mine has to put up with me forever and ever and ever.  And I am so grateful for that.

Just remind us to take a map next time, so we don't get quite as lost as we did.
I love my friends so freaking much, though.  We've hung out a lot, whether spontaneously meeting up for desert and a movie on the beloved beanbag, freaking each other out in the garage, wrestling/Nerfgun wars {I realized pitifully that I would die within the first minute of either being kidnapped or made a soldier}, listening to the boys use inside jokes as a way to start dying laughing about something apparently dirt, singing along to the Frozen soundtrack, watching movies like Mr. & Mrs. Smith,walking around the lovely temple lights, watching the ferociosity of a five-year-old {poor Bryan is never gonna live down getting nailed in the face-- literally, like, this kid scratched him and drew enough blood in this long line that the mark is still there & everyone who glances out of the corner of their eye thinks he has a bloody nose.  I tell him to make up some heroic story as a cover-up, but he's too modest.} Last Friday Bryan and I went out on a date with Lindsey and Cody biking around brightly-lit neighborhoods.  The colors were bold and holidayish and the air was crisp, freezing our knuckles and crystallizing our breath.  We stopped our bikes on the freeway overpass to watch the cars flying by, then sipped peppermint smoothies, sang as Jingle Bells as atrociously as we could on the top of our lungs since the whoosh of the traffic whisked the ugly sound away anyway, and went back to Bryan's house to huddle around the fireplace as Bryan almost lulled us to sleep with his gorgous piano skills and played a game of Life and massaged each other. 

 This month, we built a stage.  Actors Youth Theater opened up its own studio we plan on designing like the Venecian.  Even if I don't do quite as much acting as my siblings who participate in so many productions I literally {and I mean LITERALLY literally} can't keep track, the love of performance runs deep in my blood and it's been amazing seeing this all fall into place.  Adam did an eagle project the size of three-- impressing all-- by helping install seats and paint, among a million other things.  I'm proud. My mom's the president of the board too, so congrats to her.
I also can't forget the incredible experience I'm having with Fuse Performing Arts and their little Glee group Funkytown.  I'm the oldest one in the group, but I've never met a group of nicer, more welcoming and fun-loving kids.  We have a blast at every concert, and even if we're not the best group out there, it has been amazing putting together songs to sing and dance to.  I was honored to add a little candle to my cake of a Christmas season by having the choir back me up as I sang O Holy Night.

  The holiday season has begun and with the lights twinkling brightly and the spices swirling deliciously and the carols echoing beautifully... I'm happy.
  I'm happy that we have even the smallest of things.  It's so easy to take for granted the warmth of a heater, fuzzy socks, sweatshirts or hot chocolate...the peace of going to your own church to listen to tales of Christmas, of having time on the weekend to watch Hallmark movies with friends, of hearing the sound of music dancing through the frosty air.  I'm grateful that I have a house big enough to fit our lovely Christmas tree and our traditional nutcrackers and storybooks and collected set of Nativity scenes.  For the electricity to spark life in the lights. For all this delicious food that's going to make me gain weight sooner or later.  Although sometimes I whine about it, not all people are privileged enough to have a school to stress about finals in.  And maybe a winter cold isn't the most fun thing, but at least we have modern medicine to prevent the illness from becoming dangerous.
  Sometimes I get concerned about how much I have to be grateful-- why is it that I was born into a loving family with a nice home and an uplifting church and a well-ranked school and an over-abundance of food?  What did all those other people do make them have to face starvation or disabilities or discrimination or deaths of loved ones while I get to sit here, tapping away at my own person laptop computer?  If they were born into these circumstances, then it pretty much just makes life sound like a giant lottery {obviously it's not, but you get my point}that I HAPPENED to get lucky with-- and since life's not fair, I can't keep winning.  Will one day, when I'm least expecting it and completely taking advantage of everything, I lose what I've got?  Everyone has to have a trial in their life, so wouldn't it only be fair if after living so many years of blessing after blessing, I got struck down hard?
  I'm not trying to be negative or expectant of some horrible future.  But imagine if you were fighting with someone close to you and, in the heat of the moment, said some cruel thing you didn't really mean-- right before they got in a fatal wreck.  What if, I don't know, an explosion caused you to go deaf before you could memorize every song or soak up the sound of your BF/GF saying "I love you!"? Or you went blind before you could capture every sight, or lost the use of a hand, or your house foreclosed, or your government went psychotic and proclaimed tyranny?   
  We have so much.  So this holiday season-- no, forever-- I want to be grateful.