Over our almost 15 year marriage, we have lived in 4 different towns/cities. Georgetown, SC; Lexington, KY; Raleigh, NC; New York City. While we have loved different things about different locations, and there have been hard things about each location, the place we lived in that had the best weather was Lexington, KY. Why, you may ask?
SC and NC only really get three seasons – Spring, Summer, and Fall. There isn’t really a winter – at least not where snow (and I don’t mean ice) is involved. In NYC, you only have three seasons as well – but they consist of Winter, Spring, Summer (fall essentially gets skipped). In Lexington, we truly got all 4 seasons and we got them for more than 2 weeks.
In NYC, winter has hit. Again, fall lasted for about 2 weeks and then we went straight into scarf, winter hat, big coat weather. In Lexington, if we would have booked a family photo shoot in October, it would have been long sleeve weather but definitely not big coats. In NYC, when we booked our photo shoot at the end of October, what did we get? Straight up winter.
So, notice our pictures from our photo shoot. I am going to put them in progressive order so you can see the kids faces as we were out longer and as it got colder without jackets on.
Oh man, it was a rough one. That’s the thing with kids and photo shoots. You just never know how it is going to go. We did manage to get a great one for our Christmas magnet – let me know if you want one and don’t normally get our prayer letters every month!
The benefit to actually getting a longer winter here is that we get longer to do winter activities that we enjoy as a family – for instance, ice skating. We broke out the skates and went together as a family last weekend. It was a fun family filled day – complete with ice skating, Krispy Kreme doughnuts (they have one location in the whole city and we happened to be near it!), Christmas decorating, and Christmas movie watching. Yes, we did it before Thanksgiving this year – only because Thanksgiving falls late this year. It was actually Ed’s idea to do it early and usually he is the krank in our family who refuses to listen to Christmas music or entertain anything related to Christmas until AFTER Thanksgiving. So, when he suggested it, of course I said yes!
The downside to being far from family is that you don’t always get to celebrate holidays the ways you have always known – for instance, Thanksgiving meals surrounded by generations of family just don’t always happen these days. So, we surrounded ourselves with friends who have become like family from our church small group. It has been so interesting for me to learn even more this year about what our cultures do for their Thanksgiving meals (and most cultures don’t even celebrate since Thanksgiving is an American holiday). As my friend said, most cultures just do the best foods from their culture – either good foods or ones that take longer to make that you don’t normally do or ones that cost more money. So, here are some pics of our food and our friends who are like family!
And lets not forget about Black Friday shopping – we did lots of that too! Hope you had a great Thanksgiving!!