winter peepers

Christmas is over...but it was fantastic while it lasted!

Cookies were baked and distributed...

...and I flavored, split, and rolled special mini batches for us to enjoy a different Christmas cookie every night in the week leading up to Christmas.

Todd had both a daily gift for Advent and a daily joke that he pulled from our wooden calendar with tiny little drawers.

Todd bought me a special Die Hard advent calendar, too!

On Christmas, I got up early and made a cinnamon roll...big enough to fit in a 9" pie pan.

It was an easy, quick rise and I had plenty of time to bake and frost it before Todd was even out of bed!  A perfect Christmas morning treat.  I also made an accompanying apple compote.

Then it was Christmas movies, games, and lots of eating all day long...in our pajamas!  So relaxing.  But Christmas is over and we've slowly been taking the decorations down...much to the dismay of the pets, who love posing in front of the tree.

I've left a few things up that aren't explicitly Christmas, like this winter cross stitch I completed a few years ago.

The weather sure hasn't felt Christmasy.  It's been so warm and hazy.

There were a flurry of pictures on our township Facebook page when this warm front rolled in.  Here is a photo from our back yard!

It reached almost 70 degrees, but what a drop!  Just a few degrees shy of breaking our state record for biggest temperature variance in a 24-hour period.

We took advantage of the warm weather by hiking at one of our favorite winter spots, a nearby bog with a worn wooden pathway above it to help keep our feet mostly dry.

It was nice for a bit of spring weather - complete with our spring peepers chirping every day! - but hopefully we'll have more snow soon.

Have a great week!