South Carolina Christmas Part 1

We're back from our trip! It was a great time with my side of the family (ie, my mother and her two sisters and all the uncles and cousins.) We went to Seabrook Island, SC which is about 45 minutes away from Charleston. My Aunt Janet's in-laws live there so we divided up the extended family and some stayed with them and the rest stayed in a rented beach house a 5 minute drive away. We ate breakfast and lunch at our own respective homes and then had a big dinner every night at the beach house. My Aunt Janet is a fabulous cook and is one of those amazing ladies who can feed a host of people and make it look easy. I think my favorite meal was her Shrimp and Grits. It was worth the two year wait--yum!! Of course, there was lots of back and forth during the day so there was plenty of opportunity to spend time with relatives I hadn't seen in two years.

Jason and the boys and I stayed in the beach house. This was the view from the kitchen window:

And this was the view from the back deck:

My Aunt Janet brought what she calls "Christmas in a Bag." She and Julia stuffed plenty of Christmas decorations into large bags and brought Christmas from their home in Georgia to help make the beach house more Christmasy. They even got a real tree and showed Benjamin how to hang ornaments. Can you tell that the red balls on the bottom of the tree where hung by a two year old? The boys had a great time being spoiled by all of the attention. There was a lot of this going on:

I think by the end of our week stay, my cousins Patrick and Julia were pretty tired of reading the same three Christmas books to Benjamin!

And Samuel kept up his usual antics of being the family food thief; he loves oranges!

Unfortunately, Jason got sick the second day we were there and didn't recover until the day we left. So it wasn't quite the completely relaxing vacation we were all looking forward to and that's why I don't have many pictures. Oops. I did manage to break out the camera for Christmas day so that post will be up soon.