It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year....

or, the one in which we go to Husband's super cool tech company's holiday party, I get a night off in the city AND we get our Chrismukkah tree....

On Friday, Husband and I got dressed up and zOMG, spent the evening among other bonafide grown ups! Miraculous!!! This year, Husband's super cool tech company threw a party in the city (in the city!!! squeee!!!) with a Cirque du Soleil theme. After my Halloween experience of fake lashes and glitter, I was unreasonably stoked to have at the excessive cosmetics again. There is very little cause for glitter in the daily life of a stay-at-home-mom, unless you're talking about crafting (and let's not talk about crafting, because if it were a course at Motherhood University, I'd be repeating it a couple of times just to get credit).

Sadly, the fake lashes did not fly this time. Well, more precisely, they did fly---off my face, several times while I tried to apply them. I went all out and bought super fancy Sephora ones, where for Halloween I ran into CVS for 45 seconds, grabbed the first pair of fake lashes I saw and pasted them to my eyelids. This time I tried to get the shmancy kind with the super delicate adhesive and I ended up throwing them both away because I? Am just not delicate.

So instead I slathered a ton of Sephora's glitter eyeliner, did my best "sure, I know how to apply make up...erm, sort of" job of "smokey" eyes and off we went.

Ethan was none too pleased with the glitter--mostly because I wouldn't let him play with it, I think. Also? I'm not entirely sure he recognized me without a food-stained shirt and with my hair actually combed. That might account for the "who the eff is this lady making me take pictures with her on my mom's iMac photo booth? Where the hell's my mom?! And what's for dinner?!" look on his face.

The party was fabulous.

There were girly cocktails.

Four floors of par-tay. Sadly, I let my "I don't get out much" show when I spent an inordinate amount of time fawning over the black and white settees on the casino floor. "Ooooh, these are pretty!"

Stilt-walkers. You know, because of the Cirque.

This hand was super cool. Fortunately I didn't drink enough to try to climb into it, but I'm sure that at some point, as the night went on, after the old people (um, us) left, someone did.

Two girls and a giant ring.

Two girls and a ring up in the air.

So that was all really fun. We made it about two and a half hours before we turned into pumpkins. Yeah, 10:30. Because we're cool like that. Did the doormen make fun of us as we left while the 20-somethings were still coming in? Yes, sir. Yes, they did. They flat out made fun. And Husband and I took it. Because yeah, we left at 10:30, and that's lame. We get it. Har dee har har.

On Saturday, I got a Mama's Day Out. I may have mentioned that Husband was 6000 miles away in London on business for just shy of a million years; okay, ten days, which, in my defense feels like a million years when Husband is so far away and the three and a half year old is wwwwhhhhiiiiining allllllllll day evvvvveryday--oh, I'm sorry, was I whining? It's catchy.

Ethan spent ten days asking where Daddy was and responding to all of my "I love you so much"'s with "I love you too, but I really really miss Daddy." Sigh.

So when Husband returned from across the pond, I ventured out for a night into the city. I took the train, which is less romantic and idyllic than it sounds, when my reality was a little old lady sitting next to me yelling into her phone in Korean for twenty minutes. I did a little shopping, had an absurdly delicious dinner, shopped at Macy's Urban Decay counter after a couple of cocktails and then returned to my hotel room on the 24th floor of the Westin St Francis. I love having a husband whose travels garner him free stays at gorgeous hotels and who gives those free nights at hotels TO ME! He's good people.

The view from my room. Shiny!

The tree in the lobby. Shiny!!

There was some sort of Santa convention going on; I counted no fewer than 100 people dressed up in some way to emulate the jolly gift-giver. I can only imagine the children shopping in the city with their parents were mightily confused. One Santa walked down Market street with a megaphone, pointing at people randomly declaring "Naughty"...."Naughty"...."Nice" and so forth. By the end of the night, these were some of the drunk Santas roaming the lobby of the hotel.

Again with the shiny!

The revolving gingerbread house in the lobby--this lobby had just a *bit* too much going on, but it was pretty.

This morning I returned home to annoy my family by letting my inner Clark Griswold out in all it's cheesy holiday-loving glory. On the agenda? The annual Chrismukkah tree!!!! My thought? We would drive up a death-defying road on the side of a Santa Cruz mountain, select one of the dozens of Christmas tree farms to be found after any number of guardrail-less hairpin turns on the road.

We did indeed find one such farm, but Husband had not quite bargained for being handed a saw and told to have at it. Sooooo, we backed our car out of the farm and ventured down off the side of the mountain, in search of less mountain-mannish type of Chrismukkah tree procurement. Like, you know, the Christmas lighted parking lot on the side of Main Street. Amazingly we did find the perfect tree just a mile from our house, in one of those lots o' trees. In a way, I'm kind of glad we didn't go hack a tree down. NOT that there's anything wrong with that, but if there are all those trees already chopped down, we might as well scoop one of those up and make it pretty in it's last good days, right?

Obligatory rainbow picture. We saw at least three of them today because the weather is all kinds of effed up.

For a little Jewish kid, Ethan digs him some Christmas trees.

he also enjoys penguins and pretending to be a penguin.

oh, behave!

See the Star of David? That's what makes it ALL okay. Right?

Merry Happy Chrismukkah to all! And to all a good eight crazy nights.