What I did on my Christmas Vacation: A photo essay*:

Yes, Ma'am.
I do know this is about two weeks late.
I'm hoping for partial credit.

What I Did on My Christmas Vacation

by Sharon 

Marked my daughter's birthday with cinnamon rolls, swirly straws, and the traditional birthday skunk:

Cranked up the tunes, made vast amounts of chili, and used every single cookie sheet in the house:

Corresponded with Santa, with excellent results:

Dug into Christmas breakfast.  Saved room for Christmas dinner.  And dessert!

Hung out with Blake Griffin and his deltoids after dinner**.

Stopped to smell the roses (and see them glued onto floats and rolled through the streets of Pasadena):

Roared my head off with 93,358 of my closest friends...

 ...and my amazing sister.  

Having this time with her was the absolute best part of the whole spectacular, ridiculous, calorie-laden, magical marathon of overdoing everything that is the holidays at our house.  The memories we make for our families together are worth every minute of each sleepless night, and I could never pull it off without her***.

The End (of 2012)

* Doing my essay in pictures is probably going to lower my grade even more, but honestly? If I had to write it all down in words it would be summer vacation already and this blog would never get back into gear.
** We scored highly enough on my husband's "Clipper Quiz" to win court side seats to the Christmas night game.  I don't think there are words in the English language to describe exactly how thrilled and elated my son was with this gift.  For like, weeks, after.  In fact, he's still grinning like an idiot right now.
*** For example, she took almost every single one of these pictures, since my camera was buried under a mountain of piled-up paperwork I'm going to get to sometime next week