Christmas in July

WARNING: This is a seriously long post! 

WARNING #2: My favorite blogs are the ones with lots of pictures so I plan to use an excess of pictures too! Just so you know...I know.

A bit of back story:

In the Sherk household traditions are BIG. We incorporate traditions into everything- camping, holidays you name it. It's kind of a running joke that if we try something new one year and everybody likes it then it's a tradition from then on. (Sometimes we carry them on even when no one really wants to anymore. But nobody wants to be the one to say it!) 

Well, several years ago I was on what I called my chocolate chip cookie diet (I hated them for years and upon rediscovering them I pretty much ate only chocolate chip cookies for a few weeks. If you can believe it I actually lost weight though that wasn't my purpose.) That was in the middle of July and during that time I watched what was then my favorite Xmas movie "Christmas in Connecticut." Tabitha watched it with me and had cookies too. That was how it all began- our Christmas in July tradition. We've carried it on every year since then. 

A few years ago Tabitha and Melissa started their own tradition of getting Starbucks and going to a Xmas tree farm called Sleighbells that has an enormous ornament shop that is open year round. They have everything you could need for your tree. It's crazy busy around the holidays so this year we combined traditions. First we were off to Starbucks with our xmas mugs, then to Sleighbells to buy ornaments and then to the girls' apartment for Christmas in Connecticut and chocolate chip cookies.  

Note the Christmas mug.

This is our favorite room. It's full of German blown glass ornaments.

You can't really tell but that's a shark ornament biting my nose. I thought it was funny because Tabitha is actually making shark faces and noises.

This year I bought a totem pole ornament (in honor of "his people" as Christopher calls them) and an elephant. I'll explain the totem poll in another post. 

While we were watching our movie Stogie escaped under the deck fence with no collar on and was missing so we all ran out to find him leaving Liberty (Miss' lab)  and Molly (Tab's pug) in the apartment. After several minutes of looking a neighbor returned Stogie and we went back to our movie. A bit later Tab reached for a cookie from the plate on the coffee table only to find Liberty had eaten every one while we were looking for Stogie! That was like eight huge cookies! We decided later that they had planned it together. Stogie got to run free, Lib's got to eat cookies and Molly got to... sit on the couch like always? So Molly kinda missed out but the other two hit the jackpot. Sneaky sneaky!