Merry Christmas!! This year we will be celebrating Christmas for the first time as a married couple! After years of intense traveling during the holidays, we decided to stay in town this year and have a relaxing Christmas vacation. I am so glad didn’t fly this year because air travel this year was terrible and a lot of my friends were stranded at the airport for days! Also, since we were going to be in town this years, I didn’t feel guilty buying a Christmas tree. One day I was checking out all the street vendors to find which local farm had the best prices. I was going to wait until Frank got home, but instead I found the perfect tree, so I bought it and hauled it home myself! It was surprisingly much cheaper than buying a pre-lit fake tree at Home Depot, and plus, it benefited the YMCA youth programs (my old workplace, yah!) instead of um, China. Also, I read that a fake tree actually leaves a bigger carbon footprint, so I decided that a real tree wasn’t that wasteful after all. Plus, we’ll recycle it and turn it into mulch later.

My mom was really sweet and sent us our first ornament. I finally found a use for my adorable wedding cake toppers from @feltmeupdesigns by repurposing them as ornaments and hanging them on the tree!

These Christmas lights are twenty years old and they still work!  They were slow to blink at first, but then they worked just fine.  Christmas lights are so fun and pretty to photograph, and watching them blink is so mesmerizing!  For the other images, I changed the focus on my lens to get nice bokeh (blurry background) shots.  Thanks for reading and have a happy and safe holiday season!