Tina Jay Photography | Philadelphia Wedding Photographer

Whew!  Our Christmas-palooza is now complete!  Thanks to Jay, hosting the families all three days in a row was a success.  I was just a tad nervous about yesterday - we ended up having 19 people in our house!  Again, Jay did ALL of the cooking....I'm still super impressed by his skills:)  This was the only time I was in the kitchen: pretending to have a hand in the cooking:)  Good thing you can't see that I'm holding a knife to "stir" with...

My sister wanted to get shots of me doing my work - cleaning our disaster area of a kitchen once dinner was over.  I'm still trying to teach her how to focus with my camera, so this one is a little out of focus:)  Here I am starting off the cleaning spree:

Aaaand here I am about an hour in.  Not pleased, with random clips placed in my hair by my sister to keep the hair out of my face.

Hah in the end it was fun and totally worth it, but man were we EXHAUSTED today!  So we all just relaxed and laid on the couch ALL day long today.  Hope everyone else out there had a great holiday too!!

Merry Christmas blog world!  This was our first Christmas in our new house, so we decided to do it up and host Christmas for both of our families.  That means having a Christmas Eve dinner, having 9 people over Christmas day, then 18 people over the day after Christmas.  So far we have Christmas Eve and Christmas day down, and both of been a success so far - no major catastrophes, and the food tasted delicious....we just had to ask our guests to excuse the mis-matching plates/silverware and paper napkins.  We thought about buying all new plates so we had a nice table setting, but we're getting married in October so we figured we should just wait until we can register for nice things.  That sounds like a good excuse, right?  Right.

I hope everyone had a great family-filled day, and is stuffed full of Christmas goody delicousness:)  Here is a picture of Jay and I - check out his nice, neatly wrapped stocking.  Then check out his wrap job on one of my gifts.....apparently I have not taught him well:)  Can't blame him for trying, right?

Thank goodness for Jay - he loves to cook, and he made the entire Christmas meal.  Like, the ENTIRE thing.  At one point he ran outside for a minute and a timer went off, and I just stood there like a deer in headlights having no clue what to do.  I didn't know what the timer was for, much less what I was supposed to do.....I guess I really need to learn a thing or two about cooking at some point.  Our situation works out perfectly though - I LOATHE cooking, but don't mind cleaning.  He LOVES cooking (he says it relaxes him...whaa??), and hates cleaning.  So he cooks everything, and I clean everything.  We make quite a team:)

All the girls were in the living room chatting while the boys were in the kitchen cooking, so we all decided to take pictures and document them cooking, to celebrate that we didn't have to cook a single thing:)  Right about now I was loving not having to touch anything in the kitchen.  Then it came time to clean.  GOOD LORD there are a lot of dishes to clean when you host a holiday.  Whew.

Merry Christmas!  Stay tuned for Christmas #2 post.  Christmas #2 involves double the guests, and kids are thrown in the mix.  I didn't really take into account that I have nothing to entertain kids.  We only have one TV in the whole house (I know, I know), and zero toys.  This should be interesting....