Christmas 2012

Our 2012 Christmas was another wonderful one. As was indicated in the previous post, we started our Christmas weekend with a gathering at Calvin and Joyce's for Joyce's 65th birthday on Saturday the 22nd of December. Sunday was fairly uneventful, which was nice since we had to go to work for at least part of the day on Monday, Christmas eve.

On Christmas eve, we traveled up to Pioneer in Amador county to Sandy and Bill Ealy's home. Some number of years ago, we decided that we would limit our family Christmas gifts to basically a 'White elephant' sort of affair. We were also lucky in that we got to have a special addition to our family gathering. Whitney Connor is in town for a while visiting us. She is thinking of relocating from southern California  In the picture below, she is the young lady on the right hand side of the picture.

Here is Whitney with her Grand parents, Sandy and Bill! Such a wonderful family!

Everyone had a great time at Sandy and Bills. Even though the gift exchange was for white elephant gifts, there were some great gifts. One of the funnier gifts in this was that someone in the family who had bought the game shown in the picture below with Brandon, was originally bought from Billy, Loretta and Brandon at their family yard sale!

We are always so happy when we get the young adults of the family to join the older family members for these gatherings. As you know, we are always glad to have our dogs to join us for everything we do. So, in the picture below, we have Russ, Katie, Brandon and Whitney as well as Russ and Katie's dog Mac and our dog Charlie! We love the holidays!

After we got done opening the white elephant gifts at Sandy and Bills, we headed home to Rancho Cordova, 'cause Christmas morning, was just around the corner. After a little migration of gifts from the bedroom to the front of the motorhome, we were ready for Christmas morning and opening gifts with Katie and Russ. As you can see, we had a lot of gifts to be opened. We also did pretty well on the Christmas cards that we exchanged with friends and family this year.

We had a great get together with the kids and they loved all of the gifts we got them. Though we don't have a picture of it, the best gift of all was a coffee mug that Katie and Russ made for Carol.

The dogs as I indicated are always part of our family events. Sometimes, we subject them however to things that maybe they don't appreciate so much!

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Happy camping! Eric and Carol