Christmas Break

For Christmas this year Natali and I traveled down to St. George to spen Christmas with the Wyson Family. We were supposed to go to the Wyson's Cabin in Duck Creek (about 40 minutes outside of Cedar City) but there was a huge storm that dumped 7 feet of heavy snow in a day or so and the roads were closed for over a week. We ended up staying in St. George which meant no white Christmas for us this year.

Christmas was great. We spent the days before Christmas just relaxing and playing a few games. We also had a gingerbread house decorating contest. There were 4 gingerbread houses that were prebuilt so we just had to decorate them. Natali was really stresed out because as soon as she found out about this contest she kept bragging how she was gonna win because she had an "engineer" on her team. I put engineer in quotations because I am no more an engineer than she is a lawyer right now. I will take away those quotations in a few years. Anyway, lets just say I felt a little bit of pressure from being so talked up to everyone in her family.

Dana and Jason had the whole idea for doing the competition. They built the perfect gingerbread house. If you looked up gingerbread house in an encyclepedia, this is the picture you would probably see. It was perfect from the river that sparkled to the marshmellow picket fence to the wreath over the door.

Next we have Randy and Shane's gignerbread house. If oyu have ever seen the movie "Up" (Or "Snipe" for Bret and Becki) you might recognize it. The marshmellows above it are the balloons pulling it off of the ground. You will also see the g-pa, the little kid and the dog if you look hard enough. It was a cool idea. Shan also put some lights inside of it so it would light up.

Team three included the Wyson's unmariied children (Jaimee that just got back from Marine Combat Training, Jared, Tracie, and Jayden), Launa, and they got help from one of Jaimee's Marine friends. Having two Marines on the team explains the theme of the house: Fort Wiseguy. The two guys out front are Mr. Thimble and Mr. Wiseguy, 2 characters that Jaimee made up and does made up skits about these two mean old men. It is hilarious. Anyway, their Fort was probably the most protected Gingerbread house ever.


Natali kept saying to me all week that she wanted to do a tree house and I had to figure something out. I didn't know how I was going to do it but we just started working and this is how it turned out.

That is Tarzan on the left. We almost got disqualified for nudity but the leaf covers enough up ;). On the right int he window is a lion and there are 2 monkeys hanging from a vine in the middle. It turned out pretty cool, the house sat on top of one tree trunk and it was a lot sturdier than I thought it would be. We had a good time.

Here are some other highlights of our trip. We got to see Randy, Shane and their 4 cute little kids. here is a picture of Riley (She loves doing funny poses) from the last time we saw her (for some reason we didn't take any pictures of them this trip).

For Christmas we watched "The Muppet's Christmas Carol" to keep with the Wyson Family tradition. It is a great show. There was a lot of singing and I just sat in awe most of the time, trying not to mess up the very talented group of singers as they sang Christmas songs. It was great to sit around and hear the Christmas story again, and be reminded that after the shepherds were told the news of Christ's birth, they went in haste to find him, just as we must.

Christmas morning is always fun and I got spoiled more than I should have. My favorite present was a DVD that Natali gave to Santa to put in my stocking ;) It was a DVD of the first year of our marriage. Natali would spend hours on her computer and every time I would ask here what she was doing she just said she was working on a project. She was very secretive about it. What she did was she put all of our pictures and organized them into groups such as "Dating", "Wedding", "Barcelona", and other topics like that and put all of our pictures into a slideshow with music. It is amazing. Each topic has about 5 minutes of music and pictures of us and our adventures. Thanks Natali! I love it!

Well this is gettig a little bit long but we have had a great Christmas break. School will start soon and so will a new year. I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and will have a happy New Year!