Santa Hats and Soup Dumplings and Shows, Oh My!

This year our holidays have been a little different than usual. Normally, we spend Thanksgiving in Tampa drinking pompanes and eating chocolate nipple cookies and setting up Christmas lights - all of which we still did, but at Paige's home in LA. Since flights to California are expensive and we'd already used up a lot of Paige's holiday vacation time, and there were no Christmas lighting festivities in Tampa over Thanksgiving, Mom and I decided to spend the holiday in NYC with my boyfriend Sheldon.

Sheldon had to work most of the week, so Mom and I decided to take one for the team and do all the Broadway-show-watching/Rockefeller-Tree-ogling on our own.
We landed some FABULOUS seats to see Wicked (only the best show ever), by haggling with a guy scalping tickets outside (not only did we get to see the sold-out show, we saved $100 doing it!) while Sheldon cooked us dinner one night.

On Christmas Day we donned some festive holiday hats and tried our luck again, this time we scored with Spamalot, which is a Monty Python spoof on King Arthur's court. We shared a celebratory pre-show drink at Sardi's (in full hat splendor) - a famous restaurant in the theater district known for the hundreds of caricatures of celebrities on its walls (which you can see in the background of the picture).

The day before Mom left we all grabbed lunch in China Town, where we ate the most delicious food in the universe, also known as soup dumplings. Soup dumplings are like pot stickers filled with meat and broth and joy. They were so good that we went back for more the morning of Mom's flight, and even might have grabbed a "real" Gucci bag or two while we were there. It was a blast!

After Mom left I hopped on a train to Little Silver, NJ to spend some time with Sheldon's family. The highlight of this trip was finally meeting Brendan, who is Sheldon's nephew. I know all the Seligson babies are pretty cute, so you all will be less impressed than the rest of the world would be, but this little guy still gives everyone a run for their money. I also managed to finish Twilight on this trip, since Sheldon's whole family are big readers I felt right at home (can you say floor-to-ceiling book shelves? I am jealous).

We headed back to the city on the 30th and spent New Years in the city hosting a pot luck dinner. I found a great new Cheesecake recipe which was a big hit and really easy to do, it was especially nice with this chocolate sauce drizzled over it, YUM! After everyone left for their respective midnight shenanigans, Sheldon and I hunkered down on the couch and watched the ball drop with a mini bottle of champagne. At midnight on the dot, he turned, looked me in the eyes and said, "Rabbit rabbit!" Damn, foiled again...