I love Christmas time! I get to travel home and spend some time with my family. I am very blessed to have such a close, loving family (not that we always get along, but we always love each other, regardless). I had a pretty ugly drive home due to having to cross over some mountains with snow storms headed in. However, I managed to get through with some slow, careful driving. It was worth it since I am home with my family now.

I do feel bad that I haven’t had a chance to do any Christmas shopping. Fortunately, though, neither has the rest of my family. So, this Christmas is definitely based on family togetherness instead of gifts. Also, I attended a midnight Christmas service at a local Catholic church. I am not actually a Catholic, I am a Non-denominational Christian, but I still appreciate the spirit and atmosphere of the Catholic church. I never realized that the priests actually “sing” parts of the bible and various versus. It was very interesting (although I often didn’t know all the spoken parts most of the congregation knew).

Overall, I am very happy with this Christmas. I look forward to even more family time tomorrow. We are planning on making Chippino stew and Thanksgiving style fixings (we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving properly this year, so we are now making up for it).

Lots of food, and a potential diet disaster. However, small recipe modifications can result in significant changes in calories. Not to mention, when it is a higher calorie item, portion size is key! You can allow yourself your favorites, so long as you budget them into your calories and control how much of them you eat! Exercise also remains extremely important (although I certainly understand being tired from traveling and not wanting to). It is often difficult to take a walk at this time of year, but I am planning on using an exercise video tomorrow (tae bo, I believe). My goal is to get my mom and grandma to workout with me!

I will look up some good articles about holiday eating and exercise. If I find some good ones, I will post them here. I know I have certainly seen lots of writing about this before, but I have to find a free-source article in order to post it here for you. So, here I go a looking!