Christmas!!!

Christmas is only on week away! can you believe it? my family just put up the christmas tree, and we got our house decorated. for christmas eve, my family has a party either with other people our just with ourselves. then we come home and stay up late watching a movie. then all the kids go to sleep, and we wake up kind of early. we always have to wait for my dad to get up, because he sleeps a long time and they like us to open presents as a family. I usually wait in my brothers' room so i'm not waiting by myself. Then my mom comes and gets us, and tells us that we're ready to start. We line up from youngest to oldest and walk out to the living room. My house isn't big, so its not a very long walk, it's just down the hall. Then we start with stockings, then we hand eachother the presents and wait for everyone to open them. Then the rest of the day, we watch the movies and play the games we've gotten. Then we have Christmas dinner, and we usually have ham and then the rest of the food is pretty much the same as Thanksgiving dinner. What do you guys do for Christmas?

Here's some pictures of our tree

Oh and by the way, last weekend we got our first good snow fall of the season! I wish i would've gotten more pictures, but I only got one and its not very good.

Thanksgiving

I love thanksgiving, its definately one of my favorite holidays. I like it because its a good time for everyone to reflect on the things that we're thankful for. I also love all the good food. Usually, my family switches every year to which side of the family we visit, but this year we just had it here with just us. We had turkey, mashed potatoes, corn, gravy, rolls, yams, key lime pie, and i think thats it. I'm so thankful for my family and friends, my home, the clothes i wear, and the food i eat. I'm thankful for everything that i have. After thanksgiving dinner, we watched a movie together. We just pretty much spent all day together and had fun. Now I can't wait for Christmas, my favorite holiday :)

Hey! So I'm all set up now. My name is Katie and I live in Northern California. It sounds like it would be just like any other place in California, but it's not. There are no beaches, and rather than surfing, most people snowboard and ski here. There are so many pine trees here you feel like your drowning in green. The neighborhoods are smaller, and the crime and violence rates are very low. It's a place where it takes an hour to get to the mall, and if you want to by brand name clothes, you buy them online. People are generally friendly here, and you can wave to anyone, and most of the time they'll wave and smile back. For the most part, it's a quiet place to live. Some of the things to do are go see a movie, go to the lake (we have at least 5 here), snowboard or ski, walk around downtown, hang out at parks. If you really want to do something, then you will have to drive to get there. The communities are very strong here, you know your neighbors pretty well. I live in a gated community, so we have a lot of rules. You can't ride skateboards or motorcycles in here, you have to get anything your going to build approved first, and we have security patroling at all times. Sorry, this is kind of a long post. So Friday was Halloween, and it was very rainy here. Most kids here trick-or-treat in all the different neighborhoods. Some kids go the the House of Horrors, which is a building at a park where they decorate it very scary and put in our Drama kids from my high school. The kids walk through the rooms, and the drama kids scare them. They are in costume and hide all throughout the "house". I didn't want to go out in the rain, so I did my mom a favor and took my little brothers trick-or-treating. Hope you didn't fall asleep while reading this!