My Christmas and Some Awesome Cards

Happy New Year's Eve everyone!  I hope that everyone had a wonderful time celebrating Christmas with family and friends last week.  Mine was pretty good especially because God gave me the opportunity to share God's love with one of Benson's relatives.

It's always an honor and privilege to get to do that.  For brunch my family and I had dim sum with my side of the family

and then opened our presents.  For dinner we spent the evening with my hubby's family.  The food that we enjoyed was ono too. After dinner we took family pictures,

watched a slide show to recap 2013, and played some games. The entire day was lots of fun.  In closing I would like to share one of my favorite Christmas gifts

and some crafty Christmas cards made by some very talented friends.

Have a blessed 2014!

Tags and Decorations to Celebrate Jesus' Birthday

This month has been a busy one.  I am very grateful for some time off from work to spend time with friends, family, and to prep for Christmas.  Each year I come up with two different tags. This year I made three different ones.  I usually put the presents in a gift bag so my personal touch to the gifts is attaching a handmade tag to them. The tags that I choose to make always have a religious meaning to them to honor the reason why Christmas is celebrated.  Here are the tags that I made for this year.

Did you know that a wreath has a religious meaning?  I also made one tag for a friend that loves USC.

Besides making tags, I made some bows

and a gift card holder.

Before I end I wanted to share a few pictures of how I decorated our house this year.  It was a bit of a challenge since for over 10 years I've decorated our house the same way.  This year was different though because we are living in our new place to call home. This is how our house looks outside.

This is my favorite part of how we decorated the inside of our house

and some pictures of my favorite ornaments.

Thanks for taking time out of your busy holiday schedule to see what I have to share today.  I am looking forward to celebrating Jesus' B-day tomorrow and hope that all of you are having a  Happy Christmas Eve and will have a Merry CHRISTmas tomorrow! 

A Christmas Themed Tea Swap

My good friend Fran and I were paired up to be tea swap partners last month. We were asked to make some thing other than a card using Christmas colors.  Fran is super creative and talented so I felt a bit stressed with trying to come up with some thing super creative to make for her.  A bunch of ideas came to mind and I finally settled on making her a banner. 

I also surprised her with some mint chocolate tea mints and made her a bow to attach to the container.

I had lots of fun making the banner and am so happy that she liked it.  Fran surprised me with these super cute frames.  I love them!!!!! 

She also sent me some my favorite ono snacks- smoked aka legs.  Thank you from the bottom of my heart Fran for the goodies, super cute frames, and for being such fab swap partner and friend.  Thanks for stopping by to see what I have to share today. 

Reminders of the True Meaning of Chrismas

I hope that everyone is doing well and that you are having fun getting ready for Christmas.  I feel that Christmas is coming up just a little too fast and off and on I am feeling a bit stressed.  I have been praying that God will help me not get stressed.  Through the candle light processional at Disneyland last Sunday God reminded me of the true reason of why we celebrate Christmas and how I need to keep that reason in mind as I prep for it.  Being able to watch the processional with the area in front of Main Street was such a blessing.

They had a huge choir that walk down Main Street with candles and lead us in several songs, an awesome orchestra, some singers, and Kurt Russel read the Christmas story from the Bible.

 The most touching moment was when the entire audience sang "Silent Night" together.  That moment will forever be in my heart.  I truly feel that being able watch to the processional is my Christmas present from God and I thank Him from the bottom of my heart for it.  God has not only used the processional at Disneyland to remind me of the true meaning of Christmas, but being able to make cards to donate to a friend's grandmother to include with the dolls that she passes out at at a children's hospital each year reminds of the true meaning too.  Here are the cards that I made this year.  I made two of each one.

It's always such a blessing to be able to use what I enjoy (making cards) to bless the lives of others.  Have a blessed time prepping for Christmas.

Christmas Treats and My Time Away

I hope that everyone had a blessed Thanksgiving with family and friends.  Last week was lots of fun with going to San Diego for a few days (One of the places my family and I visited was Legoland), spending time with my siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins for Thanksgiving, and going to Disneyland.  After all the fun, I settled down a bit on the weekend and started prepping for Christmas- all our address labels are done and our newsletters are all printed.  During the week I started making Christmas tags.  Stay tune for a picture of them soon.  Besides making some Christmas tags I also made some goodies for my friends in the stamp club I attend each month.  This is what I made for them. (As you can see I am on a roll with making fun goodies with the chocolate dipped oreos that I purchased.  For Thanksgiving I purchased a package with all of them wrapped in Fall colors.  This time I purchased some that are wrapped in Christmas colors.)

I gave each person two of the chocolate dipped oreos and put them in a cello bag and tied it with a ribbon. Before ending my post for today I want to share four pictures with you from last week.  The first one is of me with a gigantic Hello Kitty bag that I received as a complimentary gift from the Marukai store in San Diego.

Second is a picture of a Christmas tree built out of legos.  I am always amazed at all the awesome creations I see at Legoland.

Next I would like to share one of the pictures that I took at Disneyland.  One of the reasons we went there last week to meet Thor. (My family and I were lucky that we were able to get to the amusement park early and be the first one in line to meet him.  After we took pictures with him, the line was really long.)

Last, but not least is a picture of the ono dinner that we had at Mrs. Knott's Kitchen (located outside of Knott's Berry Farm).  We had stopped for dinner there on the way home from Disneyland.

Thanks for stopping by to see what I have to share.  :)  

A Thanksgiving Card and Treats

Since this week is Thanksgiving I thought it would be the perfect time to post what I made last month's tea swap.   The optional theme was "Fall" and the optional colors to use were black and white.  Here is the outside of my card

and the inside.

As my Thanksgiving treat for friends I used a bunch of my punches to create a turkey and put it on top of a chocolate covered oreo nugget.  I didn't think I was going to be able to finish them all in time, but thanks to my hubby we were able to make over 50 of them.

I hope that all of you will have a blessed time celebrating Thanksgiving with family and friends and will have some time to reflect on what you are grateful for. For me, I am grateful that God has put in my heart to think of one thing that I am thankful for each day of this month.  I know that it's important to be thankful for what we have each day, but I admit that I don't stop to think about how blessed I am often enough.  This will definitely be one of my New Year's resolutions for 2014.

A Perfect Treat Box for Fall

I hope that everyone is having a good November so far.   The holidays are just around the corner. Even though this time of year is one of my favorites, I'm not very thrilled about needing to get ready for all the festivities.  Each year I pray that God would help me to slow my pace down despite all the things I need to do so that I can really enjoy the true meaning of Thanksgiving and Christmas.  Today I will be sharing a treat holder that a friend sent to me that is perfect for this time of year.  The ono treat inside is a package of Reese's.  Reese's are one of my favorites.  (I was so surprised that it made it all the way over from HI in one piece.  She sent it in a bubble envelope.)

When I saw her post on her blog with the treat holder, I e-mailed her and asked her to make me one.  I love the idea!  Along with the treat holder she sent me a Hello Kitty pez dispenser.

She knows how much love HK.  :)  Have a wonderful rest of the week everyone!

Veteran's Day Weekend

I hope that everyone had a wonderful 3 day weekend.  Even though it was a long weekend I still thought it went by too fast.  LOL!  It started off with celebrating my son's b-day at Chucke Cheese.  I purchased the Batman buckets and nicely arranged lots of fun goodies in it.  I attached the "Bat Symbol" tag onto the handle.

Here is a close up picture of the "Bat Symbol" and the message that I wrote on the back.  I used the bucket as part of the decorations for the table.

On Sunday we went to church, relaxed to recover from my son's party, and  had dinner with a family from church that we have become good friends with.  We took them to one of our favorite HI restaurants, Back Home In Lahaina.  While I was entering the restaurant I heard someone saying "hi" to me.  It was Leanne, the co-owner of Yumi and Fumi, which is aka one of my favorite stamp companies.  Her and her team were having dinner together after the stamp convention.  They were all nice enough to let me take a picture with them.

My family and our friends ordered different platters- the luau platter, saimin, spam fried rice, and the teri chicken and beef platter .  We each has spam musubi for our appetizer.  I ordered the seared ahi salad.

For dessert my son and one of our friends received a complimentary dessert- a chocolate macadamian nut cheese cake and a jello macadamian nut cheesecake in honor of their b-days.  Both of them were super ono.Before leaving to go home my friend and I took a picture in front of the "train station" and showed off our new pair of "Crocs."  :)

On Veteran's Day my family and I spent some fun, quality time at Disneyland.  In honor of the Veterans past and present we all wore red, white and blue.

It was extra fun being at Disneyland that day not only because it was Veteran's Day, but also because it was the first day that Disneyland had all their Christmas decorations up.  Among all the decorations were the following: the castle was covered with snow, the Christmas tree was up,

huge wreaths were up and  Small World and Jungle Cruise were decorated with Christmas decorations, and much, much more.  All the characters were wearing their Christmas attire and we got to watch the Christmas parade.  (If you click on the picture ablove with Mickey you will see that he has a Christmas vest and his jacket is much more fancy than usual.) We also got to take a picture with the characters from the new movie, Frozen, that will be coming our near Thanksgiving.  My daughter was especially happy to get to meet them.  After the weekend was over, my family and my heart was not only grateful for the Veterans, but also ready to celebrate CHRISTmas.  I think our hearts are ready, but everything else is not quite ready just yet.  :)

A Post in Honor of Hello Kitty

Over the weekend several of the local Sanrio stores celebrated Hello Kitty's 39th b-day by having a little party.  Unfortunately my family and I were only able to make it to one of them.  All 4 of us had a great time.  My daughter and I had fun taking pictures with Hello Kitty.  (We have seen HK wearing different outfits previously, but her kimono by far is the cutest.)

My son played games to earn tickets to help me earn a cute Hello Kitty bag while my daughter played some games and earned a treat bag and pencil and/or pen pouch.  (The item wrapped in plastic and a ribbon is a HK candy in a cute cupcake holder.  Each person that purchased a ticket to play games received one.)

Like I mentioned earlier we have met HK several times previously, but this time by far was the most memorable.  My daughter and I are pretty big HK fans, but their was a lady that was even a bigger fan than both of us put together.  She was screaming at the top of her lungs with excitement when she was playing the games and even shedded some tears when she was able to take a picture with HK.  Well, since this post is about Hello Kitty it's only fitting to post a super cute card that a friend made for me with HK on it.

Thanks for stopping by!