Happy Boxing Day!

No, no, that doesn't mean it's time to box all of those relatives in the nose of out the door (even though you probably want to after yesterday's craziness).  LOL!

It's the day after Christmas.  Did you get everything you asked Santa for?  How about those gift cards you collected?  What will you use them on?

Our Christmas Day turned out to be a very adventurous one.  On Christmas Eve, the electricity went off at 9:30pm.  Now, normally when that happens, it's back on within the hour.  If, for some reason it's still off when we go to bed, it's always back on by morning.

Unfortunately neither was correct this time.

I played Santa by candlelight after all the kids went to bed.  I vaguely recall seeing my alarm clock blinking in the middle of the night.  However, when the kids woke us up at 5:45am the next morning, the power was still off.  We opened gifts by candlelight (which isn't as sweet, fun, whatever you wanna call as it sounds) and waited and waited and waited for daylight to arrive.  Ugh!

16 hours later, after playing hundreds of board and card games, after canceling my Christmas Day lunch and rescheduling for dinnertime, after feeling like I'm going to strangle one particular husband, after emptying the contents of my fridge into two big coolers, and worrying myself to death over the freezer stuffed to the gills with food, the power finally came back on.

I was hand washing my second sink full of dishes when the lights came back on.  It couldn't have done that before.  LOL!  Thank goodness for our fireplace that kept us warm all day and the candles that I love to have around the house.

It'll definitely be a Christmas the kids will remember for a very long time. 

The rest of the day was filled with cooking, cleaning, laundry, Xbox, PS2, radios, and tv shows.  Everyone made up for the power shortage.  LOL.  I was exhausted when I fell into bed last night.

All in all, aside from the power outage, our meal turned out great, the kids got loads of new goodies to play with, my family was happy and healthy together, and Tim gave me a gorgeous double heart diamond necklace... that he picked out all on his own!!  Woohoo!

Here's the picture from the Zales website.  Mine has only white diamonds, not the black that it shows.

I like it!

Okay, one last thing before I go.  We've had a busy day just cleaning up all the shredded wrapping paper, stray instruction manuals, and torn open packaging.  Then we went to spend a few of our gift cards and get groceries.  Not real exciting, but town wa super crowded.

Oh, sorry, I digress....

Today's the day I announce the winner of my December-Twitter Giveaway!  This person was randomly drawn from all the entries and will receive an autographed Alex & Fiona book of her choice.

****Drum roll****

Congratulations to Christine (@cz415ad)!!  Be sure to email me your mailing addy and book choice so I can get it right out to you.  :-)

That's it from me today.  I hope you all have a memorable Christmas, with power.  ;-)