Happy Holidays!

We spent the week before Christmas in South Dakota and came back to Iowa on the 26th. We were in Miller for the first part of the week and had an early Christmas with Vera. We received many lovely gifts and went to Alco several times (For those of you not familiar with Alco--it's a very small town K-mart-type store. I've never seen an Alco in a town with a population over 5,000.). The first time we went to Alco they were having a special one-day sale on Wiis. We had wanted a Wii for a while but were waiting for the price to drop or some other good excuse. Well they had them on sale for $179.00 bundled with two games which is the best price we'd seen for them all holiday season. They also had a promotion that day if you spent so much money you got a $20 gift card. So we purchased a Wii in Miller, SD at Alco. It was pretty surprising to us to be quite honest. We've played several games of Wii bowling since :).

On the 22nd, we moved on to Estelline--we planned on traveling on the 23rd, but there was an impending snow event that was supposed to start early on the 23rd...it stalled out and didn't get to Estelline until around 4pm...but at least we were safely there without having to drive through snow. Kris and Marie opted to come early to avoid the snow too. When we arrived in Estelline we spent much of the evening helping Mom and Dad get ready for new carpet that was being laid in the living room and guest room upstairs. We moved furniture and helped dispose of the old carpet etc... On the 23rd the carpet layer came and was done by around lunch time. We then had to move all of the furniture back in. Marie and I took the opportunity to get our hair cut for cheap in downtown Estelline, and then met up with some high school friends at the local bar for supper. On Christmas Eve Stephanie made it down from Fargo. We put of the Christmas tree (one of the casualties of the new carpet was no Holiday decorations), went to church, ate Sweedish meatballs, and opened presents. After a lazy Christmas day (partially due to a touch of the flu) we headed home on the 26th. All in all a busy but nice Christmas. I hope everyone else had a lovely Christmas!

More holiday photos.