I really wanted to send Christmas cards this year, namely because WHAT OTHER YEAR am I guaranteed to have professional photos readily available? But alas, it didn't happen.
My family never sent Christmas cards, but I've always loved receiving them and sticking them to the fridge with magnets and leaving them there until they fall off the fridge three years later, edged off by new photos of the same slightly older faces.

My 5-minute post-Christmas Christmas card. Photo by Karyn Johnson Photography!
As every year, I had lofty goals for all the Christmas-y things I was going to do in December, despite the fact that Andrew and I are still living in a half-unpacked state and still have exactly 71 wedding gift thank-you notes left to write. I succeeded in watching one cheesy Christmas movie from start to finish (A Christmas Prince, obvs), drinking hot chocolate a handful of times (with copious amounts of marshmallows, obvs), and giving only three of my family members paper printouts of their gifts since the real thing hadn't shipped yet. Whoops.
Andrew and I didn't even finish decorating our tree until after Christmas. (Oh, and by "Andrew and I," I mean Andrew and his brother, who came to visit this past week and graciously completed our tree.) The ornaments were just sitting in a box on our dining room table for like a month, waiting for hooks. Why do they sell ornaments separate from hooks!? Why!?
We spent the weekend before Christmas with the Smiths, the weekend of Christmas with the Brannens (also most of the week following, during which we sorted through the house of my maternal grandmother, who recently died—a post for another day, perhaps), and the New Year weekend with the Smiths. That's where we are now, and I'm typing this from their couch as we watch bowl game after bowl game on the first day of new year, a much-needed slow day.
I'm usually excited to ring in a new year, but I was sad to see 2017 go. It was the year Andrew and I got engaged, the year we got married, the year we melded our families and our lives. But it was also the year we lost three grandmothers between the two of us, which has taken more of an emotional toll than I could have anticipated. I have no idea what 2018 will bring, likely a similar mixture of happy and sad—and when all is said and done, a similar sense that the Lord was there in the happy and the sad. I'm mainly hoping we get our little household settled and have some more slow days like today. These are my not-so-lofty goals.
GTG for now—Georgia plays in an hour.