Our good old fashioned Christmas at Nuestra Casa

This year we decided to stay home for Christmas.  The decision was not because we just wanted a good old fashioned Christmas.  We have spent most of our Christmases all alone out in the middle of the desert in the Turtle (our F350 and slide in camper).  So for us, a good old fashioned Christmas is in our little home “lost” in our lovely desert.

But this year we realized that we were VERY close to setting a Once In A Lifetime Record cycling!  And this is a very big deal to us.  The most we have ever cycled in a year was 3000 miles in 2018. 

This year due to the pandemic, Dan’s daily cancer treatments this summer, and not being able to spend time with our children, grandchildren, or family, we have cycled and walked almost every day.  (Except for the days we were camping and hiking in the desert.)

When we realized that we were close to 3,500 cycling miles this year and 1000 bike rides in nine years, we decided to stay home and cycle every day before the New Year.  The added benefit is that we got to have a good old fashioned Christmas at Nuestra Casa!  

And we loved that idea because we just love our home in the sunny desert.  We created this little piece of heaven together and it is just perfect for us!

We had fun decorating our home for Christmas.  

Dan barbecued our steaks on Christmas Eve....very yummy!

And I made my favorite Christmas fudge, pecan tea cakes, and pumpkin pie for desert.  The oranges and lemons are from our very own trees!  

We “put up” the little tree that we had used every Christmas in the Turtle on our road trips.  For a table cloth I used the tree skirt that I had quilted many many years ago when my children were still babies.  And in the center of our table we placed the Christmas flowers that Kathy and Bill had surprised us with. 

All the presents were wrapped and “under” our tree.  We must have been a good Grandma and Grandpa because Santa filled our stockings on Christmas Eve. 

Dan had made his stocking when he was a boy and I made mine 40 years ago.

Christmas morning we bundled up and took a very early morning 4+ mile walk before dawn.  We’re sure that we heard the bells on Santa’s sleigh.

And then I brought Dan his Christmas breakfast in bed.  With BACON!  His favorite.

We rode Daisy in the sunny, fresh morning air and cheerily sang out “Merry Christmas” to all our neighbors and everyone we saw.  When we finished riding, we were 15 miles closer to our 3,500 mile cycling goal!

Finally we couldn’t wait any longer to open our presents! 

Emily and Sean gave us a priceless photo book about Soren, Sebastian, and their family’s life in 2020!

Sebastian found the perfect gift for Grandma.  I love it!

Our gifts to each other which included a new book made from our blog:

Book 13.  “Our Life:   Dan and Vicky”  (May 2020 - November 2020)

We ate Christmas pumpkin pie on the patio for hors d’oeuvres. (We called it our veggies...well the main ingredient is pumpkin and that’s a veggie, right?)

We had a very scrumptious Christmas dinner, scalloped potatoes, ham, and asparagus.

For our Christmas Dance Dan created a dance list with wonderful Christmas songs.  Here we are dancing to the song that Sebastian sang with his school choir, Candy Cane Lane.  It was especially joyous to dance as Sebastian sang!

This Christmas week, we decided to watch a Christmas movie every night.  Here are the classic Christmas movies that Dan had chosen for us:  A Christmas Carol (1938), Christmas Vacation (1989), Die Hard (1989), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Mixed Nuts (1994), and Miracle on 34th Street (1947) for Christmas Day evening.  

Watching all these old Christmas movies has been very special.  They are filled with good people, mostly just trying to live good, decent lives, like most of us are doing.  They remind us of our lives as children--the world we remember when we were children growing up in the 1950’s.  

The very best thing about our old fashioned Christmas at Nuestra Casa is that all day long we emailed, texted, sent and received photos, and talked on FaceTime with our grandchildren, children, Kathy, Bill, and Tonia.  

It was a big family Christmas with all our family with us at Nuestra Casa.  It was the best Christmas ever!

We danced on New Year’s Day and joyously celebrated the beginning of 2021 in each other’s arms.