"You can kid the world, but not your sister.": Merry Christmas to You

Kevin and I are off to Costa Rica tomorrow (a major bucket list item for me), so I wanted to quickly post about Christmas. We had a bit of a crazy schedule...we started in La Porte for a pre-Christmas Eve Christmas Eve with my cousins who celebrate the actual day in Vermont, stayed the night, then drove to Fort Wayne for a party with friends, stayed the night, then drove back to La Porte for Swedish Christmas Eve, stayed the night and opened gifts with my family, went back to Fort Wayne for the rest of Christmas Day, then left early this morning to get back to Chicago to work through a major to-do list before our trip.

In total, we'll go eight nights without sleeping in the same bed twice in a row, and then we'll be in Costa Rica and still moving hotels quite a bit. Yeesh. My nomad self, trained by years of sleeping in the basement, in my sisters' rooms, on the couch, at my grandparents', anywhere but my own bed is used to this, but I think it's harder for Kevin.

Anyway, here are photos from the past four days. The holidays were wonderful, as usual. Also as usual, I'm not ready for them to be over.

Grandma and Grandpa's tree.

The hustle and bustle at Swedish Christmas Eve.

On the night we celebrated with my cousins headed to Vermont we spent some time cutting out paper snowflakes for the school shooting victims in Connecticut. Grandma brought cookies over and Sarge the bulldog made herself at home, and it was quite the craft party.

Swedish Christmas Eve dinner.

I think this is lutefisk, a Swedish dish my grandparents serve every year. Being vegetarian, I haven't tried this since I was a kid. (Darn.) I used to think those peppercorns were floating fish eyeballs.