Alex's first Christmas

Alex sportin his "My First Christmas" outfit (thanks Amy!). He loved hanging out with us - looking at the Christmas lights and listening to the Christmas music, but was not impressed with the gift-opening part. In fact, he slept through the whole thing!
We had kind of a different Christmas this year. This is our first "solo" Christmas, without going to UT or CA to hang out with the fam. It was very quiet, but fun to spend it with each other and our new little guy.

The plan was that the weekend before Christmas, I was going to go Christmas shopping with my friends to get Mike's gifts and to pick up what Mike and I had picked out for Alex. Then Mike was going to go shopping while I watched Alex that evening. Well, as you can see from the pictures, we got snowed in and literally could not get to the stores. Seattle is not equipped to take care of their roads, so they just close them and people snowboard down them. I'm not even kidding.

So we quickly got online and ordered some gifts. Well, the UPS guys couldn't get here, so Christmas morning came and...we had no gifts!
We were determined to make the day special anyway, so we each wrote down some memories from the year and other thoughts to each other. I wrapped each paper individually in Christmas wrapping paper so we had a bunch of presents under the tree. We then opened them one at a time and read them. It was actually quite fun. We decided it will be a little family tradition - Christmas eve, we will open "intangible" gifts to each other. And save Christmas morning for the "tangible" gifts. I'm going to buy my gifts on a very hot day in August next year!