lindsey, one of my best friends, came over tonight and shared dinner with us. later we made gingerbread houses out of graham crackers and leftover christmas candy. you could say that it's more festive to make gingerbread houses in december, yes, but it's makes way more sense to make them in january to use up all the candy you inevitably collect during the holidays. i think i'll make the first week of january the official week of the gingerbread house from now on.

soft lighting, fresh flowers, candles, and high pile rugs all help to make a home feel cozy but nothing quite does it like some good company. one resolution for this year is to spend more time with friends. that especially means being willing to have people over even if the house isn't perfectly decorated or the floors swept or the bathroom scrubbed. those things can wait. time with friends and lovers simply cannot.

hello there! christmas this year was terrific. we finally figured out how to make the holidays work while balancing time with all the family there is to see. i don't usually do this, but for some reason i feel the desire to share a mini play-by-play of how the holidays worked out this year. maybe to remind myself in a year that seeing everyone within 48 hours is not only possible but we can do it without pulling our hair out.

christmas eve was spent with jared's parents and younger siblings in brigham city. we watched the kids open their christmas eve gift (which was obviously pajamas! a tradition i plan to do with my own children one day) and spent time enjoying each other's company. once the littler ones went to bed we turned down the lights but made sure to leave the christmas tree lights on. we slept on our air mattress while shredstin slept on the couch. we love shredstin, and even though he is older than us, we often joke that he is our adopted son. morning came quickly and we excitedly exchanged gifts. one of my favorite parts of christmas with jared has been giving gifts to his younger siblings. it was nice to feel the magic of christmas through the eyes and excitement of jared's younger siblings.

we made our way to my parent's little cottage for brunch. my dad stole the show with a breakfast casserole that was both sweet and savory. there were eggs, cheese, a biscuit crust, apples, and a brown sugar crumble on top, similar to what would top a cobbler. i can't even, it was so good. i'm hoping it becomes an annual tradition. there were also buckets of fresh, juicy fruit, grilled potatoes, skillet sausage with sautéed peppers and onions. the perfect christmas morning brunch.

this year, jared and i offered to have christmas dinner at our place with my mom and my brothers. my mom is literally the best mom a person could have. she cooked an amazing ham, funeral potatoes, steamed broccoli, and rolls. some at her house, some at mine. not only that, but i cleaned our whole house the day before except the kitchen. when she got there, the kitchen was a complete mess of dishes stacked a mile high and trash that needed to be taken out and pots with gunk caked on that needed a lot of soaking and a lot of scrubbing. and my mom just came in there and did her thing. scrubbed the pots, washed the dishes, took out the trash, the whole bit. THEN after dinner she LEFT ME WITH A CLEAN KITCHEN. that lady. we had a pleasant dinner, all of us unable to eat another bite, followed up by PLAYING GAMES. WITHOUT ANYONE MURDERING ANOTHER. my family, we are really making some fantastic progress as adult siblings.

after everyone left, jared and i were able to enjoy the best part of christmas, the part to which we had really been looking forward. we pulled out the gifts from under our mini tree and set them out on the rug, "these ones are yours, these ones are mine". i love that we wrap our gifts individually and some are obvious and others are not. i love that jared writes, "kelli baby" on my gifts because that's really how he feels. i love that i learn from jared the power of gift giving.

i really struggle with giving gifts and i think it's because i struggle with receiving them. of the five love languages, gifts are my lowest. generally, they just don't really do much for me. they don't hit my heart the way an unexpected hug does, or the way eye contact and time spent together does. usually, i don't get the excitement and flutter of giving gifts the way other people do.

gearing up for christmas stresses me out because i don't want people to stress about spending money on me and worrying about finding the perfect gift for me especially since gifts are the lowest way that i typically give and receive love. and at the same time, i stress about spending enough dollars on people and finding a gift that looks physically big enough and at the same time is relevant and isn't just a cop out gift like an applebee's gift card and also isn't just clutter. and on top of all that, most of the people i'm buying gifts for (like parents) are self-sufficient enough to buy themselves dinner or whatever gadget i finally end up giving them.

for jared, gifts are his top love language. it is nearly the singular way to his heart. so it makes sense that he is serious about the gifts he gives. he thinks about them ahead of time and gets insanely giddy to give them days and weeks beforehand.

this year, when he got me a gardening scoop so i don't have to move dirt with my hands when potting our indoor plants, i learned something about what it means to give gifts. i was surprised that it meant so much to me. but it meant a lot because he had thought about me and my needs and wanted me to have something special and something nice. it meant so much because i never would have spent the kind of money he spent on it if it was me at the store. and it meant so much to me because i likely would have passed right by it if it was me at the store. i cherish that gardening scoop more than the $ or $$ or $$$ he spent on it. i learned that gifts are not about the amount you spend or the item you give. they are about the heart and thought that goes into them. i couldn't have purchased the special feeling i have when i look at that scoop that i've stored safely in my sock drawer, that's what he gave me. no amount of money could have purchased what that scoop means to me. that's what jared gave me. that's what gifts are about.

so this year i learned that gift-giving has power when the person receiving the gift cherishes the giver. the gift is like an emblem of the giver and their love and consideration for the givee. so it really doesn't matter what it is that they gave, as long as it was given with forethought. i learned how to give and how to receive gifts this year and i really have jared to thank for it. to me, that's exactly what christmas is about.

my parents taught me the value of hard work, especially my dad. from a young age, my siblings and i were woken by my dad around five am to deliver newspapers. we had about seven neighborhood routes, which resulted in about three hours of work for roughly five people every single day. we didn't get weekends off, no, instead, weekends were harder than ever because the sunday and sometimes saturday paper was triple the size of the weekday paper; more wrapping, folding, bagging, and heavier deliveries. it didn't matter if it was snowing outside, he didn't let us fall behind schedule. essentially, my dad successfully ran a small newspaper business, working with children and teenagers as his employees and dishing out a hundred percent of the profits to the staff.

through the years my parent's financial stability has fluctuated, as most do. in past years, they had more money than they do now. at one point of greater wealth, they took the opportunity to reserve vacation time shares in a handful of cities around the world. this summer they came upon two resort suites in park city they had booked years ago. each suite slept six and they had the rooms booked for a whole week. they invited my seven siblings and spouses and i up for any portion of the week that we liked.

the bed was king-sized, the bathroom had enough room to sit forward facing on the toilet, the bathtub was free of creeping black lines, a bowl of pricey chocolates sat on the kitchen counter asking to be eaten, and the pool was crisply cool in the july heat. after spending the weekend in the five star, central air-conditioned, fridges fully stocked, multi-hot tub resort for the fourth of july weekend, jared and i headed back home to be ready for work the next day. interestingly, while we were there, i came down with a mild case of feeling useless, empty, and uncomfortable as we lounged on the giant memory-foam mattress eating unlimited amounts of smoked gouda and fresh snap peas. i was restless in the abundant undeserving circumstances, the plethora of unearned goods bred the beginning baby feelings of depression and anxiety.

to save money, we left the window AC units off in our top-story apartment while we were gone. when we walked in the door, the apartment was exactly three degrees hotter inside than it was outside, a whopping 108°F. we flipped the AC units on, blasted the freestanding fan, stripped down to our underwear, and poured a few glasses of ice water. for dinner, instead of multiple choices of high quality meats and cheeses to choose from our fridge, we had the options of canned chili or tuna fish. that night, we crawled into our full-sized bed with packs of frozen peas melting onto our foreheads and cooling our toes. in the dark, we laid talking about how we were going to pay our phone bill..and auto insurance..and the power bill. i noticed the knot in my stomache was still there, but it was a happy knot. it was a nervous, excited, fulfilled, healthy, important knot. it was my reward for the responsibility i was shouldering.

the comforts we experienced in park city were not inherently bad. but the fulfillment of hard work is robbed when the reward is just handed over; more than that, the reward turns sour, and breeds weakness. i have to thank my dad for teaching me the value of hard work and what it means to be strong.

as a sidenote, i just have to add that jared's take on the weekend has a much different spin. he's still talking about that king-sized bed, and really, i can't say i blame him.