Santa found us at our new house!

The move is over!! Our little apartment has been cleaned to the very particular Swiss standard (took me 13 hours with 2 helpers) and we're all settled into our new house. Oh, the space, the view, the yard!!! It's just great. We've been taking advantage of the ski resort that is a short 7 minute drive up the mountain from our house. The kids love to sled and Danny has his first ski lesson this Thursday. On a less exciting note, so do I. I had a bad experience a couple of years ago and have been reluctant to give it another go, but apparently it's considered a sin to live in Switzerland and not ski, so after A LOT of "encouragement" I've decided it's time to conquer the mountain. 

Despite the fact that we missed our families terribly this year, we had a fantastic Christmas. For starters, we finally picked out a tree that didn't die before Christmas day! 

A couple of days before Christmas, we visited a Christmas market in Ulm, Germany. Our family tradition is to visit a Christmas market every year and pick out an ornament or decoration.
This is our collection so far. The skiing Santa and tree were this years find. The decorations at these markets are awesome, but I have to admit it's the food that keeps me coming back year after year. My personal favorite is the dampfnudeln mit vanilla sauce. It's basically a big cinnamon roll covered in warm vanilla sauce. We also enjoyed waffles with cherries and whipped cream, sausages, spatzli, and berliners.

This market was held on the grounds around this church which happens to be the tallest church in the world. (I don't know why we got a picture of this and none of the actual market) The kids had a blast riding the high speed carousel and warming up with a giant cup of hot chocolate in a nearby cafe.

On Christmas eve we went sledding with some friends, snacked on some schinken gipfelli, watched the Grinch, opened a present, layed out some gingerbread men, clementines and homemade peanut butter cups and egg nog for Santa, then headed off to bed anticipating his arrival.

Notice Rachel's "Christmas pajamas." Apparently the much warmer ones I picked out were not "princessy" enough.




We finished off the day with a Christmas feast, Matt's mom's delicious Swedish meatloaf, sweet potatoes with a brown sugar and pecan crust, peas (our kids love them) and Grandma Jackson's blueberry jello. 

We hope you all had a very merry Christmas and we wish you all the best in the upcoming new year!