Semiahmoo - A Resort By the Sea Covered in Snow

My family had the opportunity to spend this last weekend at Semiahmoo - we did the same thing last year and had a blast. This resort is located literally at the corner of WA State - it is right on the water and it looks over to the coast of White Rock, British Colombia. It is an incredibly beautiful environment, with both the Cascade Mountains and the Olympic Mountains in sight across the sea. 

This resort has quite a lot of significance for my family - this is where my mother and Curtis got married, the beach where James proposed to me and the restaurant where we had our engagement dinner, the golf course that my brother has worked at over the last few years, and the place where my sister currently takes her tennis lessons (and where I had several lessons and camps back in high school). This is also the beach where all my high school friends used to spend our summers...there are several remote parts of the beach that are usually empty, and we started many bonfires there during our teenage summer evenings. 

Anyhow, I LOVE that we've gotten to stay here over the last 2 Christmas breaks....we have a great time hanging out and relaxing. In the evenings we usually stay up late playing board games, and during the day we split our time between swimming, playing Marco Polo and racing in the pool (even though my brother always wins), lounging in the hot tubs, steam rooms, and saunas, playing ping pong, tennis, and basketball in the indoor courts, and sitting around the fireplace eating cookies and drinking hot cocoa. Not many better ways to relax and chill out during a snow storm!

Here are some family pics we took on the hotel's back lawn.

My brother and one of his best friends, who has long joined us for various family events.

Midnight Mass....Nah, sledding!

Well, blame it on the snow storm and blizzard we've been experiencing this holiday season...but we didn't go to any Christmas Church services this year. James and I had really wanted to attend a Christmas Eve service at 

St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Manhattan, with the Boy's Choir and the full liturgy in all its glory....but we obviously weren't on the East Coast for Christmas. 

So we decided to settle for midnight sledding. Or I guess it was more like 1:00am by the time we got there. But the sledding was amazing - we went to the 

old middle school hill with all of our siblings, the hill that everyone flocks to when it snows around here. But surprise surprise, we had the whole hill to ourselves at 1:00am on Christmas Eve. And we had a wonderful reprieve from the normally incessant wind that Lynden experiences during a snowstorm. So conditions were perfect and I suppose the quiet crunch of the snow and the dim lighting that faintly glowed on the snow had its own sacred appeal...if the weather cooperated I would make it an annual tradition!

 

Christmas Eve

Despite all the snow, my family and James' family were able to make the 40 minute drive from Lynden to Bellingham to my aunt and uncle's house. I realized how blessed we are to have both our immediate families in the same area, and that we could all share Christmas Eve together. We sang some Christmas carols, read the Luke narrative of Jesus' birth, played a gift exchange game, ate lots of good food, and just enjoyed time together as a family.

Here is my uncle John about to cut into his favorite kind of cake - Red Velvet - which I made especially for this fine occasion.

My cousin Aleah and I singing some Christmas songs.

The Rienstra's singing their hearts out - Jessica, Lois, and Jennifer.

And this couch seemed to have a few troubles with their singing...there was a lot of laughing intermixed with their melodies.

White Christmas

This has been one of the whitest Christmases that NorthWest Washington has seen in a long time - and it has been beautiful! James and I got home just in time for the whirlwind of blizzards we've experienced day after day....and I realize that for people having to drive to work it's been difficult, but for us hanging out in our PJ's at home it has been wonderful.

It snowed all day Christmas Eve, and then it snowed for a few hours Christmas morning. The flakes were large and thick and glorious. We had tried playing in the snow a few days before Christmas, but it was only 15 degrees or so and the snow was like white dust - you couldn't form it into a snowball or a snowman very easily (although James claims we just weren't trying hard enough). So last night, on Christmas Eve, James and I and all of our siblings went for a late night sledding adventure at 1:00 AM. It was SO MUCH FUN!!! Jessica even rounded up a shopping cart for us try out - she had just come back from Colorado and claimed it was great fun when she did it there. But it looked more like a huge catapult machine, so we decided to stick with sleds. There are some great pics of us sledding, but I'll have to put those up in a day or so.

It truly has been a winter wonderland around here, and we've loved it. It has made for a beautiful and scenic Christmas break.

The Macy's Parade

We were sitting about 1 1/2 blocks from the Empire State Building - perfect location!

Here's Miley Cyrus promoting the movie "Bolt." We also got to see James Taylor on a float.

This parade is possibly one of my favorite events of the year. Every Thanksgiving morning that I can remember, I've woken up and watched this parade in my PJ's while my mother got the turkey started and my siblings slowly arose from bed. This event officially ushers in the Holiday Season, and it signifies a great American tradition for generations past. No matter what era children have lived within, the looming and brightly colored massive balloons, the shiny tubas and the clanging cymbals of the marching bands, and the grand finale - Santa on his slay - have continued to thrill and excite children again and again. And there is something sociologically enchanting about this event - people from all over America join together in excitement and anticipation and sheer silliness to watch the Macy's parade. This may sound cheesy or trite to some, but I think that there is significance in traditions like these...there is something completely humane in the unity these events bring about.

I've also watched the movie "Miracle on 34th St" every single Thanksgiving weekend for as long as I can remember. This movie features prominently the Macy's parade, and it has always been a dream of mine to attend the parade live some year. Now that James and I live only 1 hour from the city, we had to make it up to the parade at least once.

So this was the year! James was a very good sport (although there were a few grumbles prior to the event), but we both had a fantastic time. Most of our friends told us we were crazy for wanting to go stand amongst huge crowds in the freezing cold, but it was completely worth it. We actually got very lucky with our seating because a man gave us free tickets when we got up there to sit in the special grandstand bleachers right in front of the Macy's store. So our view was perfect, we got to sit down the whole time, and the temperature was really quite pleasant - around 45 degrees and mostly sunny. So here's to the Holiday Season!