Christmas is Here!

This week, Christmas arrived in the form of a UPS box.  My in-laws sent us a little Christmas package since   we're missing the annual Christmas festivities back home.

Like excited kids, we opened up our box


and found it filled with wonderful presents!


Me and some of my Christmas goodies

The next day, I started my morning off with a cup of my new Peach Momotaro tea (one of the presents my mother-in-law sent me).  It's a hand-tied bouquet of tea leaves and flowers that are dried into a little ball.  When you put the ball in hot water, it opens up like a flower.

 

Of course I had to enjoy it in my awesome snowman cup

I spent the quiet morning sipping my tea and browsing some blogs and came across this post from iheartfaces.com.  It's a really neat tutorial on how to create shaped Christmas light bokeh.  Bokeh is basically that blurry, dreamy, out-of-focus look - like what you see behind the snowman in the picture above.

Following the tutorial, I cut out a circle a little bigger than my lens diameter and then cut a little star out in the middle.  I was too lazy to create the cylinder part to fit around my lens so I just held up my little circle to the lens and centered the star in the middle.  Here's what I got:

Pretty neat huh?


I tried one with a heart too, but it came out a bit distorted, not quite sure why...

A few other pics I took around the house of what I love about Christmas:


This will be the second year that we're spending Christmas abroad, and though it's not quite as hard as it was last year, it's still hard not to miss being home with family for the holidays.  But to take our minds off all we are missing, we're taking a trip instead.  We'll be having Christmas dinner in Hanoi and ringing in the new year in Ho Chi Minh City!

And one more thing - Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!