Merry Christmas...a little late.

Better late than never?
Yes.
Right?
Uhg.

As an excuse, I may have blogger ADD. I start writing a post, get interrupted, and promise myself I’m going to go back and finish it. Instead, I end up with 3 different half-finished blog posts.

Before it gets any later, I thought I should just go ahead and smush everything into one big holiday recap post.

Pre-Christmas: Cookies

Taylor and I decided to bake cookies for our respective workplaces as Christmas gifts and man was it an undertaking. I LOVE baking but this was such a different scale than I’m used to! We baked 5 different kinds of cookies and ended up with over 200 cookies total.

This was the lineup:

Gingerbread Cookies (men, trees, and Texas)

Lemony Slice-And-Bakes (with lemon icing)

Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

Almond-Oat Lace Cookies

Brickle Brownie Bites

It was a lot of fun getting to bring so many cookies in to work! Every single one was eaten so I would say our gifts were fairly successful!

Christmas in Dallas & New York

Our Christmas festivities officially kicked off on Thursday night when we met Taylor’s whole family at the movie theater for a showing of Mission Impossible. Have you seen it yet? It was incredible. It’s definitely up there with my favorite movies of the year.

Early Friday morning (Christmas Eve-Eve), Taylor and I went to a showing of Sherlock Holmes. Yes, two movies in two days. Guilty. But it was worth it. Morning movies are awesome - the theater tends to be empty and the tickets are wonderfully matinee-priced.

Friday afternoon we packed shopping bags full of gifts and headed over to Williams’ house for a delicious dinner followed by an evening full of gift-exchanging.

Saturday morning we headed to the airport for our flight to New York. The first three days were jam-packed with family fun. In summary: Christmas Eve we celebrated with my mom, Christmas Day we went to Long Island to celebrate with my dad’s side of the family, and the day after Christmas we spent the day in the city with my mom’s side of the family. The time in the city with my cousins involved crêpes for brunch, a walk through Central Park on our way to The Met, and ended with burgers at Shake Shack!

Taylor and I then had two days in the city to ourselves and we made sure they were not only productive, but involved visiting a lot of yummy eateries.

Ess-A-Bagel.

Self-explanatory.

And yes, we brought 4 bagels back to Dallas.

The MOMA.

Coolest exhibit? An artist set up a kitchen and served free Thai Curry to museum guests. The goal was to explore the juxtaposition between quite conversation that typically takes place in a museum versus the lively conversation that takes place over a meal. Food is totally art.

Knave Coffee Bar.

Super pretty coffee.

While we were at Knave it started to rain. We had thought ahead when we were packing and brought not just one, but TWO umbrellas with us to New York. I even got a third [adorable little polka dot] umbrella for Christmas. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a single one of them with us at this point and got absolutely soaked on our way to our next destination, which was The Soup Man. No pictures were taken at The Soup Man since we resembled drowned rates.

Crif Dogs/PDT.

Crif Dogs is a hot dog joint in the St. Marks area with phenomenal French fries. PDT stands for Please Don’t Tell – Manhattan’s very own speakeasy. You enter it through a hidden phone booth in Crif Dogs. Favorite place ever.

Stumptown

Best coffee in Manhattan. We always visit when we go to NY. The one and only bummer about Stumptown? They only take cash.

Brooklyn Bridge

Did you know that you can walk across the Brooklyn Bridge? It's prettier to walk from the Brooklyn side to the Manhattan side because you get an awesome view of the city skyline and can see the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty. Coincidentally we got to the bridge right at sunset – it was gorgeous!! But extremely cold. Maybe don't go in the dead of winter.

Milk & Cookies Bakery

I've been swooning over this cookbook for the past few months and was beyond thrilled to receive a my very own copy for Christmas while we were in New York.

After I had flipped through a few pages - okay - read the book from cover to cover, I discovered that the cookie recipes were from an actual bakery....and that bakery was located in downtown Manhattan!!!

We of course just had to go and try the cookies for ourselves and made the trip to the shop on our last evening in NY. The special of the day was a bacon-cranberry-chocolate chip cookie. Yes, seriously, bacon! It was surprisingly very tasty!