Gingerbread Courts

Last weekend.  The weekend right before finals.  But not the one right before Christmas.  The one that you can be guaranteed all of your friends can be in town for.  So naturally, what do you do this weekend?  Throw Christmas parties.  Don't worry, I didn't ahve to thrown one.   But I attended quite a few.  It all started on Thusday night with our racquetball team dinner.  It was a good time, fairly formal (which is odd for a group that meets at 6am wearing shorts and t-shirts), and there was plenty of good ole BYU-catered food.  The best part was that our coaches gave us all jackets!  With our names on them!  They are basically the coolest things ever.  Anyone that knows me well, knows that all I need in life to be happy is a good jacket.  Or a good bag.  Or heck, even a good pair of shoes. :) (Ok, the bottom line is, I'm easy to please...).  So needlesstosay, I was all but thrilled to receive a jacket declaring my status on a sports team to the world.  I think Megan and I have worn them for at least a few minutes every day since we got them. :)  

Friday night wasn't exactly a party I guess, but an event nonetheless.  I went to the Jon Schmidt Christmas concert!!!  This thing is pretty much legend around these parts and Stefanie took the initiative and got tickets for us and our friend Megan Bird.  It was a good time.  Jon Schmidt rocks my world.  Basically.

Saturday was the real kicker.  I spent the entire day at the library attempting to be productive prior to finals week.  I'd say I was successful for the most part.  Originally, I had three parties to attend but lucky for me, one got cancelled.  And honestly, I'm really not crazy popular.  It's just...people like to throw parties that weekend.  So the first one was Cameron's.  I dragged Megan along with me and we bascially just spent the entire time building the coolest gingerbread house I've ever made.  Megan and I, naturally, decided to make a racquetball court.  And with the valiant help of Marcie, we made our wonderful creation. 

We decided to make it a game of iron man (two people against one) with two elves against santa claus.  And I know, Santa Claus is massive.  It's actually quite hysterical I think. That thing with the green m&m as a head is an elf.  Just so you can now appreciate the magnitude of Santa. :)

Here's another view.  From here you can see the spectator stands.  Granted, I've never actually seen any kind of racquetball court with these kinds of stands but hey, it works.  Also, we came up with the idea to have Rudolph ref the match.  And then, innocently, Marcie called him "Rudolph the Reffing Reindeer."  Oh, and NPU of course stands for North Pole University.

And the proud creaters of the coolest gingerbread contraption ever made.  Usually, when I'm handed a bunch of graham crackers and some frosting, I lose all motivation and creativity in about 10 minutes and just start eating candy.  But this bad boy, held my complete attention until the end. :)

From there we left and after wandering around Springville for awhile, we finally found our way back to Monticello.  After finding Brian, the three of us headed over to Kat and Annie's.  Kat and Annie lived with Megan in Monticello last fall.  I spent a few nights on their couch.  So...I guess you could say I know them. :)  It was a fun little gathering though.  We spent the majority of our time there singing Christmas carols at the piano.  It was great.  

On Sunday, after a full day of choir and other assorted musical numbers, Brian and Jen and I headed up to Salt Lake for our Spencer family get together.  It was really great to see everybody.  There are so many little kids running around these days!  We counted and the great-grandchildren have officially overtaken the amount of grandchildren.  And as grandma would say, "There's not a bad one in the bunch!"

All in all, it was a full, festive weekend.  I do enjoy a good Christmas party.  So a weekend full of them was just great.  I can't wait to continue the festivities when I go home in just TWO days!