Our West Coast Christmas

As it turns out, the west coast cel­e­brates Christ­mas just like the rest of the United States. I wasn’t cer­tain, but am glad to see it’s true. After buy­ing a tree ear­lier last week, Katie and I waited until Christ­mas Eve to actu­ally dec­o­rate it. We had to go through the still packed boxes in our garage before find­ing the right ones. We unpacked our dec­o­ra­tions and enjoyed a won­der­ful tree by our fireplace.

With the tree dec­o­rated we got dressed and went out to do some shop­ping. Liv­ing in Seat­tle gives us access to a few new stores and we’ve been slowly explor­ing them. Brands like Trader Joe’s, Frys, and World Mar­ket. None of these are in Orlando so it’s awe­some to finally get to check them out. World Mar­ket was the one we explored with our pri­mary goal being to pur­chase items to use in stuff­ing each oth­ers’ stock­ings, and the sec­ond goal being to find a tree top­per. At the store we bought the first Nut­cracker I’ve owned since I was a child.

As a kid I had a siz­able col­lec­tion of Nut­crack­ers, lit­er­ally prob­a­bly nearly 50 of them. I had begun col­lect­ing them as a 7–8 year old, and kept col­lect­ing up into my teens when I lost inter­est and got rid of them. I think we sold them at a garage sale — I can’t remem­ber for sure. I regret not hav­ing the col­lec­tion any more, while I’m sure it’s not a major col­lec­tion of any finan­cial worth — it still brings back memories.

In any case, once we fin­ished up at World Mar­ket we took to explor­ing the rest of the area around Belle­vue and trekked around the mall. In the mall we con­tin­ued our hunt for a tree-topper. We found a wooden table dec­o­ra­tion of a female angel hold­ing a heart, though not tech­ni­cally a tree top­per we thought it would work won­der­fully and could be tied with wire or some other means to the top of the tree.

With our pri­mary mis­sions com­pleted we indulged in the ulti­mate mall treat: Aun­tie Anne’s pretzels.

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On our way to din­ner, I knew we were run­ning early but I wanted to allow us enough time in case of traf­fic or get­ting lost. When we arrived with a half hour to spare I decided to take the oppor­tu­nity to explore some more, so we kept dri­ving and came to a dead end loop in a quaint shop­ping area that abutted Lake Wash­ing­ton. After sit­ting and enjoy­ing the quiet Christ­mas eve on the lake we got up to head back to the car and on the walk back Katie spot­ted a woman car­ry­ing fresh baked goods.

It mer­its explain­ing that my fam­ily has a tra­di­tion of hav­ing mon­key bread on Christ­mas morn­ing, it’s not a long stand­ing tra­di­tion but it’s one I am par­tic­u­larly fond of and one that Katie and I intend to keep. But up to this point of time, we had not found a store sell­ing it — fresh or frozen. So the bak­ery was our hail­mary pass.

The bak­ery was the Madi­son Park Bak­ery and they were in the midst of clos­ing up shop for the hol­i­days, leav­ing for a week. We had a won­der­ful chat explain­ing our delight in find­ing mon­key bread, as well as get­ting cook­ies for Santa and for us. They were quite gen­er­ous with extra cook­ies and giv­ing us a bag of sweet buns. We’ll def­i­nitely be going back.

With the baked goods acquired we begin mak­ing our way to Nishino for din­ner. (Of note, a google image search of Nishino brings up some anime char­ac­ter, not restau­rant related images as hoped.)

Our din­ner was fan­tas­tic. Expen­sive, but fan­tas­tic. We enjoyed won­der­ful sushi and the only thing which let me down was a soba noo­dle bowl, but I am will­ing to over­look it as the sushi was truly fan­tas­tic. Did I men­tion it was fan­tas­tic? Because it was fantastic.

Dur­ing din­ner we chat­ted and talked about Christ­mas, about this year and mar­veled at the fact that we now lived no the west coast. I remem­ber the feel­ing when we moved across Orlando from the west side to the east side and how “odd” it felt — now we’re on the oppo­site side of the coun­try and I’m feel­ing per­fectly fine with it.

I’m off work until the 3rd of Jan­u­ary, and our goal is to get moved into the house dur­ing the time off. Also dur­ing that time I need to get my dri­vers license and license plate moved up to Wash­ing­ton. We’ll see if the west coast DMVs are as unbe­liev­ably dis­or­ga­nized as they are on the east coast.