Long time no see!!  Sorry I’ve been MIA for so long – I hope your holiday was as busy (and fun!) as mine!

The past two weeks have been a blur, filled with a gift exchange with my girlfriends, driving around the fancy part of town looking at Christmas lights, and spending lots of time with family.  We even got snow on Christmas Eve that lasted through Christmas day – who would have thought Dallas would ever see a white Christmas?

But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself – we had a Christmas Eve that couldn’t be beat!  We spent the evening in the penthouse suite at the Stoneleigh Hotel . . .

[Just imagine a night sky and tons of snow and you'll have a pretty good idea of how the suite looked on the big night!]

. . . where my future brother-in-law surprised my sister with an engagement ring!  Both families were hiding in a back room to surprise my sister after her fiance popped the question – it was so much fun, and I couldn’t be more excited for them.

The fun continued on Christmas day with LOTS of goodies (more about those later!) and good times with our families.  We’re so lucky that both of our families live in Dallas – the thought of having to pick one family to spend the holidays with sounds so hard!

And can you believe that as of December 26th we’ve been in our house for 1 year?  It boggles my mind, and I can’t believe that over the course of a year this formerly-empty house . . .

. . . now looks like this and this and this and this.  Crazy!

We capped off the holiday celebrations with a quick trip to see the ICE! exhibit at the Gaylord Texan – to say that it’s a Texas-sized ice exhibit in a Texas-sized hotel is an understatement.  As you can probably imagine, two million pounds of ice carved into scenes from The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is pretty darn impressive!

[Yup, those are just random people from the exhibit's website]

So that pretty much sums up my holiday!  It was excellent, and I loved every minute – how about you guys??