christmas dinner… 2011

After the naps were complete, we all headed over to Mother & Father M’s house for their first Christmas dinner in their west coast house! We had pretty much gone on a hunger strike since brunch, knowing that we were about to indulge in lots and lots of food and drink!

Miss L dressed up in her Mini Boden finest (some of you may remember me contemplating whether or not to buy it on Twitter… thank you to those who said YES!) and we headed over to eat!

First stop… getting presents that weren’t brought over in the morning… including this awesome pair of springy chopsticks! While watching her eat edamame with regular chopsticks is fun, I think she’ll actually be able to use these pretty well!

While waiting for dinner to be ready, we all pigged out on appetizers and Mumm (aka. California champagne) and enjoyed the spectacle of sparkly lights, Dicken’s Villages and either Aladdin or Dumbo on TV (Miss L’s current favorite visiting requests).

Then it was time for the main affair… dinner! And as it has been for the past few years, we celebrated with the most delicious prime rib. (Don’t tell anyone I ate 1 AND 1/2 HUGE thick cuts for dinner…)

Miss L tried her best not to spill on the infamous holiday tablecloth from the Vanderbilt’s estate….

Even puppies behaved well and were on their best behavior in hopes of getting some of the scraps from the dinner table.

Then… came the presentation of desserts. Father M has a family tradition of aiming to make a dessert for each person present at dinner! This year, there were 7 amazing desserts (just 1 short for all 8 people) to choose from!

And after we all dug into them… we continued to stare and stare and stare at them in hopes that we could find room for a little bit more!

But I can proudly say that I ate a bit of each dessert… and we kept eating the Bailey’s Irish Cream cheesecake through this week until every tiny piece was gone.

And with that… the gluttonous holiday of Christmas was complete… and another lovely dinner with family and friends was in the books.

When we finally trickled home to bed, Miss L insisted on doing some reading on her Lion pillow with her new blanket and Simba at her side while reading the Lion King (we totally don’t theme our presents/experiences at all … do we? ).  And don’t let that happy face fool you… a day of this much over-stimulation really did her in for that night and it took every single member of the household to get her to sleep that night… but then again, who ever wants Christmas to end?

Hope your Christmas day was just as magical as ours!