Merry Christmas 2010!

Christmas 2010 was more fun than basically any Christmas ever, and I owe it all to Macie! From shopping for her to baking with her, to watching her eyes light up with excitement on Christmas morning, having a two year old definitely made Christmas more special. One of my favorite Christmas traditions is having Christmas Eve dinner with the Allred family. This year we had dinner the night before Christmas Eve on the 23rd {I'm not sure why?} but it did not disappoint. We went out this year and had dinner at Diamond Lil's. The only way to describe Diamond Lil's is Trash-tastic. It is very rustic {and not classy rustic, trashy rustic} but the food is yummy. It doesn't hurt that their portions are darn generous. I learned my lesson about Diamond Lil's though, always, and I mean always get the prime rib. It's the best thing on the menu! After dinner we went with my parents to the Grand America. My mom heard somewhere that they had decorated all the shop windows with candy like ZCMI used to at Christmas time. It turns out that the windows were not decorated with candy but they were decked out for the holidays. We had so much fun walking around looking at all the Christmas decorations and gingerbread houses.

{Amazing!}
{Santa's Toy Shoppe}
I thought these trees were fabulous! They are gingerbread cookies in the shape of stars, stacked to look like Christmas trees. {My neighbors may or may not be getting these for Christmas next year!}

I decided that Steven doesn't get enough photo love on the blog. Mostly because he never lets me take his picture, or he's the one behind the lens.

I loved all the Christmas trees around the hotel, I secretly wish I lived in a hotel, like "Eloise at the Plaza".

Can you just picture me skipping down the hall like I own the place? I really wanted to, it took every bit of self control I had not to.

These are the windows that we thought were decorated in candy. Like I said, not candy, but still pretty!

Each window represented a letter of the alphabet and a word that is associated with Christmas. The hotel had cards that you could fill out as you walked around and when you had all the words you turned in your card for a cookie {the most delicious shortbread cookie ever. Ever.}. We discovered after we walked around the entire hotel that there were these two trees at the front doors of the hotel with ornaments that had all the answers on them.

Of course we had to kick back in the lobby and enjoy the fruits, or should I say cookies of our labor. Like I said, Best. Cookie. EVER!

The girls in their Christmas Eve jammies, reading the Polar Express.

Macie rocking her new baby doll. {The picture is blurred because Macie sings a rousing rendition of Rock-a-bye Baby}

Then she traded in her doll for a gun... What can I say, she has a lot of boy cousins!

Somehow I managed to get like two pictures of Elizabeth, but I promise she was there for all of this too!

Merry Christmas!!!