Holidays

As with any other couple, holidays are crazy. Especially when you are soon to be married and you want to be together and both of your families want you home. So we started the compromise. We went to St. George to Richard's family's house for Thanksgiving and to mine (Allysa) in California for Christmas. Thanksgiving was a blast. Richard went fishing with his dad, and then I was privileged to watch as Richard and his brother Michael golfed. We did have fun with the two older guys they golfed with. It was definitely different for me to be having Thanksgiving without my family. And since I had started this new job and Richard had his job, we were only there on Wednesday and Thursday (the day before and the day of), and we had to drive back on Thursday night to attend work on Friday. But life is good, we are grateful for jobs.
Going down to my house in Cali for Christmas kept us busy. I flew down the Friday afternoon before Christmas and hung out with my family, and Richard came down Sunday early, so he could attend church with us. It was only a day and a half and it seemed like forever that we were apart. Everyone enjoyed meeting him, and I enjoyed introducing him to everyone. He looked so handsome in his suit. Sunday night we had our usual "Sunday before Christmas" get together with our friends and we had dinner and acted out the nativity. Monday we got everything ready for Christmas the next day. We worked on the back room that needed sheetrock on the walls and the ceiling. My dad only worked a half day and brought some old carpet from his building home with him, and we put that down. Monday, since it was Christmas Eve, we were having a Round Robin with some of our friends and we were doing Soup and all that at one family's house and then we were having dessert and gift exchange at our house. So we set up all the chairs in the backroom and then mom decided she wanted to have a Christmas Tree in the room, so Richard and I were sent on a search for a Christmas Tree. We got a 7 foot tree for $10. Sweet huh? We brought it back and decorated it. We had a blast at our Round Robin. The third house we went to, after ours, we did gingerbread houses and acted out the nativity. It was neat. Then we went home and went to bed. Christmas was wonderful. Richard gave me a beautiful necklace of a heart with a star inside and also a girl's cut BYU football jersey (what do you expect). We had fun. Then we drove home the day after Christmas.
This is only a short synopsis of our first holidays together.