The Junior League sponsored a Christmas tree display at the Stonefield shopping center. Different businesses and organizations each sponsored a tree and you could walk around the square and see them all. We went over one evening a few days before Christmas and it was fun to stroll through them:
Kevin was very excited when he found out that there would be a close conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn last week. He was adamant that this was not, as the news kept saying, actually the first sighting of the star of Bethlehem since the 1200s, but they did make a very bright sight in the star and you could see both planets well through the telescope:
In lieu of a Christmas party, our friends Sam and Tony had an online trivia night (Christmas-themed, of course) and asked for ugly sweater attire. Benji and Kevin obliged (spoiler alert: we kicked butt at trivia and won all the prizes):
Kevin got this game as part of his Secret Santa gift from work. It involves getting hit over the head with a club if you use a word with more than one syllable:
The night we finally played dreidel. We played 2 ten-minute rounds. For the first, the winner got a "forced trade" of one advent calendar (we've been rotating who gets to open each one, and some are definitely more popular than others). For the second game, the loser had to empty the dishwasher:
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| He's very invested in the outcome |
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| Yelling at the dreidel to land on gimmel |
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| He learned from the master |
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| Our elf Scarlet was getting into the spirit |
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| Sugarfina made a Hanukkah tasting calendar this year with special candy for each month of Hanukkah. It didn't arrive until night #2, but it has been great |
CBI held it virtually last night. Here is our entry, "Hanukkah in 2020:"
We had Andrew and Cathy over for outdoor dinner and drinks and cookies. It was chilly, but we used the heaters aggressively and tried to make it as festive as possible:
Having decided not to go to New York this year out of an abundance of caution, we are setting out to make a festive Christmas at home. We've never had stockings before, since we are usually in Rockland on Christmas morning, but I ordered this sweet set from Etsy and we enjoyed hanging them on the mantle:
On Saturday, our school district sponsored a "day of play" for families. They posted all sorts of exercise and play videos and asked families to do them together (in exchange for entries in a raffle). We did several of the videos, including HIIT training, Zumba and Yoga:
