Tree Trimming

[as you can tell these are totally all out of order - We're at Gordon's brothers in New Jersey so I'm getting some free time to do some posting here and there. I think I'll back date this one so it's not confusing in the archives....]

The craziness of our holiday season starts pretty much with Thanksgiving. My Mom's birthday is November 28th, so she either falls on or just after Thanksgiving. It's become somewhat of a tradition to have a little birthday celebration for her the weekend of Thanksgiving since we've all got some extra holiday time. Sometimes Gordon's parents come up that weekend too and we get to have a big "MasterWong" family dinner. But that didn't happen this year, since G's Mom was in Hong Kong.

Our plans got a little skewed this year due to a mishap on Thanksgiving (my Mom fell and had to get to a dentist on Friday, but she is OK now) - so we moved our gathering to Sunday instead. My parents drove up from Fall River and Eric and Liza made the trek from the Cape. We decided to take advantage of the opportunity to pull out the Christmas decorations. We have a "fake plastic tree" that we've used for the past 4 years. I do think it'd be nice to have a real tree someday, but I do LOVE how easy this one is to put up and decorate. I mean the lights are ALREADY ON IT. I worry that once we decide to make the leap to a real tree we'll never actually have a tree.

Everyone pitched in and our condo was ready for Christmas in no time. Lily really enjoyed the tree-trimming experience and did a great job carrying the ornaments that Uncle Eric handed her over to Grammy.

Eric working hard on the tree

Getting some help from Lily

A rare Masterson family portrait

In honor of Mom's birthday, Gordon cooked a yummy surf and turf - prime rib and baked stuffed shrimp - dinner for everyone. I think I may have made some potato gratin to go along with it - I can't remember. Of course we also had a chocolate raspberry cake from Rosie's to top it off -because - well yum. Lily went from eating only fruit for dessert to having cake quite regularly during the month of December thanks to all the birthday celebrations (my Mom, Gordon, his Mom, Lily). She's going to be very disappointed once January rolls around and life returns to "normal".

The cake that started off the month of sweets

Topping off the night with a story from Papa