Thankful, Merry, and New Years with Friends!

Another very belated post!

When Will and I got married, we decided we would rotate holidays with our families- that way we would get to experience Thanksgiving and Christmas with both sides at some point.

This year was Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with Will’s family!

My family is of course, in North Carolina, so it was a mini road trip for us. Like most trips, no matter where we go, they are always short and jam-packed! We make the most of every minute. Unfortunately we don’t get to go to many of our family stops very often as we are both so limited with either time-off, farming, or so many places we want to try to fit in, that we run out of times. This certainly makes the goodbyes that much harder. We were able to spend time with everyone in my family which was so great! (I wrote a post about this right after we got home- so check it out! I believe it was called Thankfully Thankful. Of course there are plenty of pictures!)

Christmas with Will’s family is one holiday I have not blogged about yet (as you know- since I have fallen incredibly behind on my posts!)

We started the December month off by running the St Jude 5k, and Will’s Dad ran the FULL Marathon. (Yes- that is 26.2 miles, compared to our 3.1 miles!)

Before:

Will and I finished:

The reason you run this race:

And then hunting down Ted as he continued to run 23.1 more miles than us!

We helped decorate the tree at Will’s parent’s house. This is the second or third year we have done this with his Dad now- and every year is entertaining! (We never did get the tree very straight…)

During the month of December, we also went to one of Will’s oldest friend’s (Kelly) weddings! Unfortunately we never did get good pictures… Neither of us brought our phones in- but it was such a beautiful wedding!

We decorated our Dr Seuss- looking Christmas tree- we both really liked our tilting star! We also let Toby and Wells open their gifts!!

(Our voices are way too high-pitched in this video, but we love our dogs and they get so excited!)

Finally we make it to Christmas! We stayed in Memphis with Will’s parents. Both of his brothers- Clancy and Trotter, Jennifer and Sam were home this year too!

Christmas Eve Day was spent with the King family for a big lunch.

That evening was the Christmas Eve Candelight Service and dinner afterwards! Will smoked his first turkey and it was fantastic!

We all woke up early and celebrated Christmas with coffee and presents and then had Dim Sum for lunch!

Once the festivities finished, everyone slowly started leaving and returning him over the weekend.

Will and I still had one big event to host at our house! A New Years Eve celebration with lots of Will’s college friends before they kicked off their annual duck hunt!

For our dinner we chose to go all out and use every wedding gift we could think of! It was definitely dressier than necessary, but we had the best time!

Everyone bunked at our house for the night, so we celebrated New Year’s with champagne, friends, fun, and guns at midnight!

Lorien, Mary-Beth and I rode the four-wheeler and practiced shooting guns that weekend when everyone moved to the hunting lodge! This actually ended up being the second New Years several of us have spent together. Since I for some reason don’t have many pictures- I’ll post one of us girls from last year- because they had a shooting guns the first year too!