a very west coast christmas

it’s a lazy boxing day today. i’m feeling a bit too timid to venture out into the vancouver boxing day shopping crowds. more like lazy actually. chris is definitely too polite to push around others for a sake of a good deal. i on the other hand will do just about anything to get a discounted sweater from the gap.

this has been a year of many firsts for chris and i, one being, our first christmas away from home and the east coast. knowing that I might be hard to be so far away from everyone, we’ve tried to keep ourselves busy with a lot of the same things we’d do at home and some other fun things which we’d never get the chance to experience. last week we trekked again to whistler-blackcomb and had an awesome day boarding in the mountains. the skies cleared just long enough for us to finally get a picture of the mamouth peaks around us.

christmas cookies. the idea of them sounds so good. so fun. until you start making them. and then you realize how much of a pain in the ass the process is and wonder how each year you dupe yourself into doing it all over again. we made snowflakes. a martha stewart sugar cookie recipe. i am obsessed with her and her domestic godliness. i think they turned out wonderfully and we only lost about 6 months of lives achieving cookie perfection.

martha would be proud

christmas eve. yazbek tradition calls for a big seafood spread and a flurry of nieces and nephews working hard to contain themselves before the big present opening, which usually lasts a mere 10 minutes. it’s chaos. but a good chaos that we sadly missed this year. chris and i did something very different this year – dinner and a show – it’s a wonderful life. change is always good.

some shots of christmas eve day in van city...

christmas eve before all of the events

just because i love my new dress here is this picture

here’s a christmas first for us – dumpster diving. chris gave me a starbucks gift card. i noticed it missing this morning and went into sheer panic realizing how many hours of chai latte enjoyment were suddenly lost. i scoured the apartment. nothing. it was gone. this brought back a frenzy of horrible memories. it was christmas eve 1989. i was 12 years old. i got a NKOTB poster which sadly made its way into the fireplace during cleanup. i feared the same thing happened, but this time, the dumpster might have been the culprit. i woke up chris. he understood the importance of this mission. we went downstairs to the room where the trash and recycling are kept. not one of our shining moments, agreed. but, just below the surface of the recycling pile was…my starbucks card! in our own little pathetic way, we had saved christmas.

a re-creation...

christmas day brunch