Goodbye Christmas

On the first day of Christmas, we celebrated like so: plenty of time on Skype with family.

One the second day of Christmas, we spent the day at home, playing with new toys and enjoying being together.

On the third day of Christmas, we found a new holiday treat: Clementines with cloves that are fun to decorate too!

Skip ahead to this weekend, and we've had 12 days of Christmas. In the meantime, we listened to a steady stream of Christmas songs ('Feliz Navidad' and 'The 12 Days of Christmas' are still being hummed by everyone).  Bob and I went to work for a few days, but productively worked while the office was quiet. We were wishing for snow, but we still haven't gotten any on the ground in Basel. We even rode our bikes one day, and also have been getting a lot of use out of the boys' new remote control trucks outside!

We celebrated my birthday -- the boys (including Bob) enjoyed shopping for me and baking a cake.

New Years' was quiet this year. Bob and I stayed up watching trivial German shows for the New Year, including Top 10 Apres-ski music. Unfortunately, we aren't able to watch many televised New Years' celebrations happening elsewhere as we count down locally, due to our timezone. Perhaps next year we should go to bed on time and wake up at 6 am to celebrate with New York! (We were up at 6:30 am with the kids anyhow.) We made sure to enjoy a few piggies for the New Year, hoping for good luck.

We also took a family trip to the Basel Zoo, where it was cold enough to see the penguins march in a parade. We visited the new monkey house to sit and watch the monkeys play.

Back to school was tough for the boys, as they quite enjoyed the time off with very few plans. They started a new session of swim lessons last week -- this is Willem's first class, and is in the "Crabs" ("Krebs") group.

So on the 12th day of Christmas, we celebrated "Three Kings Day" (also known as Epiphany in the U.S.), the traditional closing of Christmas. We made sure to eat a "Dreikonigskuchen", that is, a cake of 7 segments of bread baked like a crown. I found a small queen in my bread, so I became the queen for the day!

And now our Christmas decorations have all been put away, and the last of the Christmas treats have nearly all been eaten. Goodbye to Christmas. Happy New Year 2012!