Family, Friends and bourbon challah casserole | our Christmas break 2016

I am baaaaaaack from my winter break! Well, sort of. I have a few sessions scheduled for January but I decided to take it easy in the beginning of the year to relax, recharge, do some housekeeping things for my business, catch up on my favorite shows, have lunches with friends, take leisurely walks with my dogs, play boardgames with my family and be a tiny bit lazy – I figured I deserve it! I will be catching up on blogging studio holiday sessions and getting ready for my Best of 2016 photo contest – stay tuned for those!

In the meantime I wanted to share what I’ve been up to last couple of weeks. In the past I was selective about personal images I shared on the blog – I felt that being a professional photographer all images I share with the world had to be perfect in a way – well composed, well processed, well lit. But life is not always perfectly composed, edited or lit and I along the way I realized that it was OK for me to create images that were less than perfect. Like these ones – most of them were shot in the evening at very high ISO (which means that they were grainy and color was a bit off) , between cooking and chatting. Some of them are posed, some of them are silly but all of them are authentic and capture moments I want to remember. And I feel that’s what photography is all about – at least for me! So if you want to see what I did – here you go:

We hosted our 7th annual Christmas Eve dinner with our whole family – it was loud and crowded and a bit crazy and absolutely perfect!

We snuggled up with Millie:

The girls wrote letters to Santa and said good-bye to Snowflake – our Elf on the Shelf:

We opened gifts on Christmas morning in our PJs – I don’t think Millie was impressed with her gifts from Santa Paws:)

We did some skiing and hung out with our friends at a ski house – there was made-to order cocktails (curtesy of our friend!) and bourbon challah french toast casserole (made by yours truly!) – as well as lots of tickles, board games and staying up way past our bedtime.

And there was an annual New Year’s Eve celebration at my parents where we said good-bye to the old year and greeted the New Year surrounded by my favorite people!