Sunday, November 28, 2010

My Birthday Weekend

This time of year is crazy for most people with Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years all within a few weeks of each other. Well, we in the Gordon household wanted to make things exciting... why don't have both of our birthdays, our anniversary plus the normal holidays oh and moving and watching my 18 month old niece for a week all in a six week time frame? It makes for a crazy couple of weeks but so far it's started off well.

Around the beginning of Oct. all of the pecan trees start dropping their nuts and continue through the beginning of Dec. I started collecting the pecans from my parent's four trees. While I was out there, I also started picking my neighbor's up for her too since she is 94 years old and can't get out and do it. Well, it turns out it was a good choice because this same neighbor has a cabin up in north Georgia in a town called Helen. Our neighbor didn't have anyone using her cabin for the weekend of my birthday and she was very grateful for us picking up her pecans that she let us stay in her cabin for the weekend. My family has had a time share in Helen for about 20 years but they just sold it and it is a really cute town to visit so this was a treat for us.

We left for Helen when John got off work on Friday and got there around 7. I had made dinner to take up there and we spent the evening stuffing ourselves and sitting by the fire. The town of Helen is Alpine themed and all of the shops and buildings have to have alpine themes. There aren't many chain stores or restaurants either. Also the Chatahoochee River runs right through the town which people float down in the summer. We went window shopping on Saturday in the town and found a few Christmas presents for our sisters. We also went on a short hike around a lake in Amicalola State Park. We stayed through Sunday morning which was my actual birthday. Sunday afternoon we had oldest sister, Christy, and her husband, James, over for dinner. My mom made an awesome dinner and birthday cake.

A few days later was Thanksgiving. John had to work which was pretty crappy but I guess that's part of being an adult. My parents and I went to one of my mom's friend's house for about an hour to make Thanksgiving goodies with her grandchildren. We made little turkeys out of chocolate rice crispy treats and pilgrim hats out of cookies and chocolate covered marshmallows. When we got back Christy and James were there and John came home soon after. He was able to get off at one instead of three which was awesome since the turkey got done much earlier than expected. My aunt also came but everything was done so early that we started a few minutes before she got there. We spent the afternoon playing games and went shopping at Michael's. The only Black Friday shopping we did was the midnight rush at Walmart. I have tried to come up with something exciting to get for Christmas but there isn't anything that we need or want badly enough that we don't already have.

We put up the Christmas tree on Friday as per tradition. We also helped my parents put up and decorate their tree. Another tradition we have which I always forget is eating Mexican food on Black Friday. We started it when we were dating and John remembers every year and I forget every year. Anyway, I will put up pictures of everything later on, it takes too long and it's getting late.