I LOVEE the holidays!  It’s such a fun time of the year…..holiday parties, potlucks, glittering Christmas lights & decorations, yummy food, spiked eggnog!  And what I love even more is that I get to spend time with loved ones & see friends I sometimes only get to see once a year.  Here are a few pictures from this year’s holiday festivities!
On Christmas day Jeremy, my brother, and I rode our bikes 20 miles from my house out to Seal Beach and back.  It wouldn’t be a SoCal Christmas if you couldn’t spend it at the beach!

Then we had both our families over for a yummy Christmas dinner.  Here’s our family pic!

On Sunday my roommates from college came over for our annual Christmas gift exchange.  This is our 7th straight year of getting together & exchanging gifts!  Last year we handmade our gifts.  It wasn’t the easiest thing for most of us, but everyone did such an amazing job last year creating their gifts that we decided this year’s gifts should include something handmade again.  Here’s the handmade portion of my gift…little greeting cards that I designed & printed myself.

We had a potluck & everyone brought over some majorly delectable dishes.  L to R: blanched green beans and watercress salad, white bean salad, kimchi fried rice, prosciutto wrapped Asian pears, braised fatty pork

Mama Leone’s chicken soup, an amazing pizza, pancetta/italian sausage/sirloin beef pasta, & cookies!

My mini black Christmas tree with pink ornaments!  Perhaps next year we’ll get a real one.

And onto the gift exchange!

Of course I wrapped my gifts to Viv in High School Musical gift wrap! =P (Thanks to Juli for these next few pics.)

We repeated last year’s reindeer picture, then decided to do something different for this year.

I totally failed at doing a mustache and somehow ended up with a beard as well.  LOL