mortierworld: Ohio Christmas, Part II

After spending several hours opening gifts, laughing and enjoying each others' company, we had worked up quite an appetite. Christmas dinner was amazing as always. Here we are all squeezing in around the table. Once Alana and Evelyn are big enough to sit at the table too, my parents will need a bigger table!

Kate, Emily, and Trina getting their food. Purple was the color of the day. :) Katie, I love your awesome reindeer earrings.

Here's Evelyn demonstrating how we all felt after the feast.

The rest of the afternoon (and really much of the week) was spend on games and hanging out.

Katie gave Chris and my dad table top corn hole for Christmas. It was rather addicting actually...

My mom had made a big batch of chili for dinner one night. She wasn't very happy with how it turned out - a bit too bland - so she divided the batch in half and turned it into a chili competition between the guys and girls. :) Katie and Nathan (2) missed the cooking process so they were the official, unbiased judges. :) Here are the guys busy at work on their chili.

And here are the two judges contemplating their decision. They were placed in separate rooms so they couldn't influence each other's votes. ;)

I won't make *too* big of a deal out of which team was the unanimous victor ;) ;) because both batches of chili turned out absolutely delicious, but let's just say the girls weren't the sad ones that night. ;) Both teams spent time researching "secret chili ingredients" and reading chili blogs online. Lol. The guys secret ingredient was a few Hershey kisses and the girls was cinnamon (we almost ruined it by accidentally dumping in half the bottle - it may have smelled a bit more like mulled cider than chili in the kitchen for a bit... :)). Overall it was a very fun and competitive evening. :)

On Sunday we had some surprise visitors!

Liz and I realized that they would be driving within 10 minutes of my parent's house while we were in Cleveland and they were on their way to Canada. It was great fun to see Steve, Liz and Sam again for an hour or so. Too short but very good as always. :)

One of Christmas gifts was a trip to Christmas at Stan Hewitt. Stan Hewitt Hall and Gardens is the mansion estate of the family who started Goodyear Tire (I forget their names, the Seiberlings perhaps?). The house and gardens were all decked out for Christmas. The gorgeous inside of the house was all decorated in a Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" theme. Unfortunately photography was not allowed inside, but trust me, it was pretty amazing. :)

Here we all are by the gate house getting our hot chocolate and getting ready to head up to the house. Apparently there were 500,000 decorating the outside of the house and grounds.

Part of the front of Stan Hewitt:

Part of the back:

The green house was also all decorated in different color lights. Each tree had a different ornament theme as well - fairies, nutcrackers, birds - it was really well done. (Sorry these are a bit blurry, it was very cold outside and I was too impatient to hold super still :)).