Homemade Christmas

I promise this does not need a spoiler alert. I am not giving away what Brad and I are sending people for Christmas. Although you may already know part of it. Because I am awful at surprises.

This is no secret. I am really, really terrible at surprises. I like giving people gifts ALL days of the year and for no real reason. When I get something fabulous for someone, I don’t want to wait for a specific day to give it to them. I just want them to have it and be as excited as I am about it.

This makes life around Christmas-time (and birthdays and anniversaries and weddings and any other gift-giving occasion…) super difficult. Especially when you are writing a blog where you like to share your recipes and crafts and fun homemade things.

Brad is bad at surprises, too. This is great for both of us because no one is really disappointed when Christmas Day comes and there is no big gift we just can’t wait to open under the tree. And no one is super disappointed on their birthday when they know exactly what they’re getting.

We even got engaged a week or so before “planned” because Brad simply couldn’t wait until Christmas like he’d originally planned. We had just come back from Ashley & Mike’s rehearsal dinner, we were talking about life and love, we were at my family’s house… And Brad just couldn’t wait for Christmas morning. It was the perfect moment. He proposed at 3AM on December 18, 2009.

It was absolutely perfect. And I was incredibly surprised. So I guess it worked either way.

So my terrible knack for revealing gifts too early is why I think I have found it so difficult to write a blog post this week. I have a lot of things in the works, but they are mostly Christmas presents that I will be mailing all over the USA to people on our list. And although I have hinted that the gifts this year are homemade (we are broke…) and delicious (we are really good cooks), I haven’t given away the ENTIRE surprise.

But here I go – in pictures.