While y’all were running around shopping, cooking, and getting your Christmas ducks in a row, we were here in Vero Beach.  Here’s what our Christmas looked like.

Our first order of business was where to be for Christmas…  Pulling into Vero Beach on Monday the 16th, we had the chance to finally slow down and chill with the wonderful people we have been running into along the ICW.  We met up with the crew from Magnolia, Adamant, and Colleen Mae.  All folks we <3.  When we heard that 2/3 of them were resigning to “stick” in Velcro, ahem, I mean Vero Beach, JR and I decided to do some boat work here and stay as well. Awesome.

Now, what to we do on Christmas??  That one was easy, ’cause we’re all in the “same boat” :)  See what I did there?  Ha!  Anyway, someone was kind enough to start a list and organize a pot luck dinner.  Cool.  Dinner at 1 with lots of other people who miss their families too.  Perfect.

Now onto specifics…  What do I cook for the pot luck!?  Where to go for mass?  Gift exchange, anyone?  I checked The Boat Galley Cookbook and bam!  Sweet potato casserole, done!  And my famous Christmas fudge, of course :) The closest Catholic church only had mass at 9 pm, not midnight…  Well, 9 pm is cruisers midnight, right?

So we did our Christmas dinner shopping on Christmas Eve, with everyone else and their mother, and I cooked and prepped for the rest of the day with the Christmas music playing and white lights twinkling.  At about 8:30 pm, I dragged my napping husband to mass.  Now, if we were at home and had a car, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal, but Christmas Eve was BLOWEY!  So, getting slightly dressed up and heading out in the dark was a tinkle bit undesirable, but I have a husband who hates to disappoint, so we went.  It was lovely.  It was about a mile walk and although it was blowey, it was warm.  The church was beautiful and the folks were fanciful!  We were entirely under-dressed, but supposedly baby Jesus doesn’t care about that…  After the service we walked back to the dink, hoping for a caring, Christmas Christian to offer us a ride, but no one did.

Christmas day came and as JR was cooking breakfast, we got a visit from a couple of Santa’s elves!  Our crazy, sweet friends over at Adamant brought us freshly baked cinnamon rolls for breakfast.  They take good care of us :)

Then we did normal stuff like called everyone we love to wish them a Merry Christmas and took showers.  Oh, and we squeezed in our traditional family photo shoot in the cabin which proved to be interesting, to say the least!

The pot luck started at a very timely 1o’ clock and in our usual Christmas fashion, we showed up late! There was TONS of good food and it lined both the washers and the dryers in the laundry room. We sat outside, in the beautiful 75 degree Florida shade and had Christmas dinner with our new cruising family.
After dinner a few of us did a quick White Elephant gift exchange and I walked away with two beautiful red candles, one for each year we have been married ;)

Folks started heading back to their boats a little earlier than I expected so a bunch of us decided to continue the celebration elsewhere. The crew of Journey, Adamant, Dales Star, and Kamouraska (all pictured above) met up again aboard Adamant around 6, and chatted Christmas Day away.  JR and Dale are seated in front because they look so much alike.  Dale was recently asked if he was from the boat, Journey.  Seriously, they are like twins.