(First Annual?) Christmas in Concan
The Boudloche clan tends to be very traditional when it comes to Christmas. Not traditional traditional, but we generally adhere pretty firmly to our own weird traditions. For 37 years, we've all gone to sleep at my parents' house on Christmas Eve, after a family dinner and hanging the stockings ("the stockings were hung by the chimney with hooks"), Santa comes during the night and puts out presents, then we wake up Christmas morning and open stockings, eat breakfast, then open presents for hours, after which we rest, get cleaned up, then eat Christmas early dinner. (Note: I can't guarantee that we did exactly this 36 years ago, as my memories of my first few years are pretty sparse and unreliable.)
Even as we've gotten older, we've continued these traditions. Last year Santa put out presents in the night, even though I was the youngest attendee at 37 years old. Some things have changed, of course.. Laura and I help with the cooking now, our spouses now attend, as well, with good humor and tolerance, there's about a billion stockings between all the people and the pets, and mostly we no longer start opening presents at 5am. Mostly. But the rest of it has remained largely the same.
Until this year. We decided this year that we'd really enforce this thing we've been trying for a few years where we spend less on Christmas presents. We've made efforts in the past, but it hasn't been all that successful. So this year, we decided to draw names and buy only for that person, and set a tight and low money cap on the presents for that person. We also realized that would substantially change the dynamic of our Christmas morning, since our former 3 hours of present opening would now be accomplished in 20 minutes or so. To distract from that difference, we decided to just go whole hog on changes, and completely redo Christmas.
Enter Christmas in Concan! When we were kids, we'd vacation every summer in a cabin on the Frio River in Concan, TX, southwest of San Antonio. We have a lot of memories tied up there, as kids with our friends, as adults with our spouses, and Matt even had his bachelor party there, inspiring Laura a few years later to have her bachelorette party there, as well. It's a good place for us. So we rented one of our favorite cabins (15! not right on the river, but on a cliff overlooking a great view of the river) and started planning.
Sarah and I riding horses in Concan, circa I-have-no-idea.
Six people and three dogs. Nobody knew how it was going to turn out.. maybe it would be a complete disaster, maybe it would be wonderful, but we had high hopes. And it turned out wonderful.
Standing in the Frio River at Laura's bachelorette party, circa 2009.
We arrived on Monday (the 23rd) in the late afternoon, and Laura and John (and Ginger the sheltie) had already begun decorating the cabin with candles, lights and things. Once the folks pulled in, we discovered that we'd all brought more food than we'd promised we would, and the only way we could possibly eat it all in the time we were there was to eat nonstop until we left. So we ate delicious mom-made turkey noodle soup to get us started, then started in on the 5 kinds of cookies we'd brought.
Plus an entire fridge packed full of food, 4 or 5 containers of cookies and baked goods, and two coolers of beer.
Tuesday (Christmas Eve) we rolled out of bed late and enjoyed some waffles. Yes, I brought my waffle maker camping.
Sunrise from our cabin.
Then after a brief stopover in Uvalde to pick up some running shorts for Matt (who intended to run, but had forgotten to grab shorts), we drove over to Lost Maples State Natural Area for a Christmas Eve hike! Matt headed out for a long run, dad and John went out for a short hike, and mom, Laura and I set out to hike the 4.6 mile challenging East Loop with the dogs.
Yes, we hiked in santa hats.
It was, in fact, a challenging hike, with a long, long steep uphill followed by a long, long steep and rocky downhill, but humans and dogs all persevered and were amazing, and we were rewarded with amazing scenery and an incredibly fun hike.
Enzo enjoying the reward for his tough hike up.
And this was our view when we got back down to the bottom again.
It was a little late in the season for most of the trees, but we were treated to a few amazing displays of foliage.
We were there for longer than we'd really anticipated, so we were all hungry, and hungrier still after an hour drive back to the cabin. We feasted on a very late lunch of sandwiches to tide us over a few hours until dinner, then got to work decorating our tree before the sun went down. We didn't bring any sort of tree with us, because we intended to find some small Charlie Brown-style tree to adopt.
Okay, technically it's a mountain laurel and some sort of ouchy, thorny bush, with an assist from the oak(?) overhanging them.
The perfect tree was right outside our door, but it wasn't really small, and we went a little overboard with the number of decorations we brought, so perhaps not a true Charlie Brown tree, but we were really happy with how it turned out, and we could see it from the front windows of the cabin.
Perfect.
After all that decorating, we were hungry again (can't.. stop.. eating.. must eat all the food), and John and Laura whipped up a delicious shrimp risotto for our Christmas Eve dinner. After dinner we sat around drinking egg nog and playing Sequence until it was time for bed. We hung our stockings on some conveniently-located hook-like things, and headed off to bed.
"The stockings were hung from the table with wrought-iron scrollwork.."
Christmas morning! We slept in a bit, then we all rolled out of bed with various levels of enthusiasm. The ladies threw ourselves into breakfast prep (we still managed to have most of our traditional Christmas breakfast foods), and the boys joined us as they woke. Matt was the last up, since he'd had some sort of weird allergic reaction after his run, and was loaded up with Benedryl to stop the itching and rashing. We've always gotta have SOME sort of weird health thing on Christmas.
Christmas morning shepherd.
After breakfast, we opened stockings and presents, then Matt laid back down to sleep off more of his Benedryl hangover while the rest of us went down to the river with the dogs. Dad fished, John went on a walk, and mom, Laura and I romped with some happy (and then wet and smelly) dogs.
Happy. And smelly.
After showers for people and dogs, we had grilled cheese and turkey soup for lunch, then took the dogs for a walk in order to visit the goats we'd discovered the day before.
Hilda nibbled their hooves a few times. Maybe we shouldn't give them hooves as treats, then introduce them to the owners of the hooves.
Christmas dinner was a delicious spaghetti pie courtesy of mom, followed by a fire in the firepit, and some traditional Christmas s'mores! And throwing all of our paper products in the firepit. Mmm. Fire.
Laura kept combing the woods with a flashlight to find dead sticks to feed the fire. John kept combing the cabin to find paper plates and gift boxes to feed the fire. Both valid methods.
Dad headed off to lay down, and the rest of us played some Cards Against Humanity until the day caught up with us.
Crashed hard.
On Thursday, we ate breakfast leftovers, made sandwiches for the road with our lunch leftovers, packed up the 2 weeks worth of food we hadn't managed to eat, undecorated our tree, exchanged our last hugs, then hit the road for home.
<3
We haven't determined whether there will be a Second Annual Christmas in Concan. But when we were packing up the ornaments from the tree, we decided to communally put them all in one bag. In case some tree in the future needs disposable decorations.
Selfie.
I think it's pretty safe to say this is now a tradition. We'll see you next year, cabin 15!
Traditional family Christmas picture, slightly untraditionally.
Merry Christmas, y'all!
Even as we've gotten older, we've continued these traditions. Last year Santa put out presents in the night, even though I was the youngest attendee at 37 years old. Some things have changed, of course.. Laura and I help with the cooking now, our spouses now attend, as well, with good humor and tolerance, there's about a billion stockings between all the people and the pets, and mostly we no longer start opening presents at 5am. Mostly. But the rest of it has remained largely the same.
Until this year. We decided this year that we'd really enforce this thing we've been trying for a few years where we spend less on Christmas presents. We've made efforts in the past, but it hasn't been all that successful. So this year, we decided to draw names and buy only for that person, and set a tight and low money cap on the presents for that person. We also realized that would substantially change the dynamic of our Christmas morning, since our former 3 hours of present opening would now be accomplished in 20 minutes or so. To distract from that difference, we decided to just go whole hog on changes, and completely redo Christmas.
Enter Christmas in Concan! When we were kids, we'd vacation every summer in a cabin on the Frio River in Concan, TX, southwest of San Antonio. We have a lot of memories tied up there, as kids with our friends, as adults with our spouses, and Matt even had his bachelor party there, inspiring Laura a few years later to have her bachelorette party there, as well. It's a good place for us. So we rented one of our favorite cabins (15! not right on the river, but on a cliff overlooking a great view of the river) and started planning.
Sarah and I riding horses in Concan, circa I-have-no-idea.
Six people and three dogs. Nobody knew how it was going to turn out.. maybe it would be a complete disaster, maybe it would be wonderful, but we had high hopes. And it turned out wonderful.
Standing in the Frio River at Laura's bachelorette party, circa 2009.
We arrived on Monday (the 23rd) in the late afternoon, and Laura and John (and Ginger the sheltie) had already begun decorating the cabin with candles, lights and things. Once the folks pulled in, we discovered that we'd all brought more food than we'd promised we would, and the only way we could possibly eat it all in the time we were there was to eat nonstop until we left. So we ate delicious mom-made turkey noodle soup to get us started, then started in on the 5 kinds of cookies we'd brought.
Plus an entire fridge packed full of food, 4 or 5 containers of cookies and baked goods, and two coolers of beer.
Tuesday (Christmas Eve) we rolled out of bed late and enjoyed some waffles. Yes, I brought my waffle maker camping.
Sunrise from our cabin.
Then after a brief stopover in Uvalde to pick up some running shorts for Matt (who intended to run, but had forgotten to grab shorts), we drove over to Lost Maples State Natural Area for a Christmas Eve hike! Matt headed out for a long run, dad and John went out for a short hike, and mom, Laura and I set out to hike the 4.6 mile challenging East Loop with the dogs.
Yes, we hiked in santa hats.
It was, in fact, a challenging hike, with a long, long steep uphill followed by a long, long steep and rocky downhill, but humans and dogs all persevered and were amazing, and we were rewarded with amazing scenery and an incredibly fun hike.
Enzo enjoying the reward for his tough hike up.
And this was our view when we got back down to the bottom again.
It was a little late in the season for most of the trees, but we were treated to a few amazing displays of foliage.
We were there for longer than we'd really anticipated, so we were all hungry, and hungrier still after an hour drive back to the cabin. We feasted on a very late lunch of sandwiches to tide us over a few hours until dinner, then got to work decorating our tree before the sun went down. We didn't bring any sort of tree with us, because we intended to find some small Charlie Brown-style tree to adopt.
Okay, technically it's a mountain laurel and some sort of ouchy, thorny bush, with an assist from the oak(?) overhanging them.
The perfect tree was right outside our door, but it wasn't really small, and we went a little overboard with the number of decorations we brought, so perhaps not a true Charlie Brown tree, but we were really happy with how it turned out, and we could see it from the front windows of the cabin.
Perfect.
After all that decorating, we were hungry again (can't.. stop.. eating.. must eat all the food), and John and Laura whipped up a delicious shrimp risotto for our Christmas Eve dinner. After dinner we sat around drinking egg nog and playing Sequence until it was time for bed. We hung our stockings on some conveniently-located hook-like things, and headed off to bed.
"The stockings were hung from the table with wrought-iron scrollwork.."
Christmas morning! We slept in a bit, then we all rolled out of bed with various levels of enthusiasm. The ladies threw ourselves into breakfast prep (we still managed to have most of our traditional Christmas breakfast foods), and the boys joined us as they woke. Matt was the last up, since he'd had some sort of weird allergic reaction after his run, and was loaded up with Benedryl to stop the itching and rashing. We've always gotta have SOME sort of weird health thing on Christmas.
Christmas morning shepherd.
After breakfast, we opened stockings and presents, then Matt laid back down to sleep off more of his Benedryl hangover while the rest of us went down to the river with the dogs. Dad fished, John went on a walk, and mom, Laura and I romped with some happy (and then wet and smelly) dogs.
Happy. And smelly.
After showers for people and dogs, we had grilled cheese and turkey soup for lunch, then took the dogs for a walk in order to visit the goats we'd discovered the day before.
Hilda nibbled their hooves a few times. Maybe we shouldn't give them hooves as treats, then introduce them to the owners of the hooves.
Christmas dinner was a delicious spaghetti pie courtesy of mom, followed by a fire in the firepit, and some traditional Christmas s'mores! And throwing all of our paper products in the firepit. Mmm. Fire.
Laura kept combing the woods with a flashlight to find dead sticks to feed the fire. John kept combing the cabin to find paper plates and gift boxes to feed the fire. Both valid methods.
Dad headed off to lay down, and the rest of us played some Cards Against Humanity until the day caught up with us.
Crashed hard.
On Thursday, we ate breakfast leftovers, made sandwiches for the road with our lunch leftovers, packed up the 2 weeks worth of food we hadn't managed to eat, undecorated our tree, exchanged our last hugs, then hit the road for home.
<3
We haven't determined whether there will be a Second Annual Christmas in Concan. But when we were packing up the ornaments from the tree, we decided to communally put them all in one bag. In case some tree in the future needs disposable decorations.
Selfie.
I think it's pretty safe to say this is now a tradition. We'll see you next year, cabin 15!
Traditional family Christmas picture, slightly untraditionally.
Merry Christmas, y'all!