Waking up in cold, dry, dark Utah after a week in the tropics was not our favorite thing. (Seriously, my skin LOVED the Caribbean. Pretty sure it got shock-frozen the moment I got off the plane in Salt Lake ): ). But Christmas music helped a bit. The holidays are different now that we don't have weeks and weeks of break where we can just hang out with family at home! But we had a fabulous Christmas and New Year. [:
Ryan’s company Christmas party was a lovely black-tie evening at a gorgeous venue. We loved chatting with friends, enjoying the fabulous food, and of course the much-awaited charity raffle. Ryan was such a champ - he had dozens of tickets in the running from doing all sorts of things for local charities. We didn’t win a single drawing, but good thing he just looks so good in his suit! Let's be honest, I didn’t care about no raffle with this guy as my plus one.
Winter at the plant. I love being right at the base of the Uintas while I work. The fluffy snow is always breathtaking (sometimes quite literally so, as I open my car door and turn into a popsicle).
Sample runs make for lots of strategic planning to minimize the time spent walking in the freezing temperatures, and I sure am thankful for my new down coat! Wearing it never fails to make me think of the Pacific Northwest.
We also got to check out the progress on our newest reservoirs. I am always just blown away by how we puny people can build something so big and that holds so much water at one time. It’s like a giant cathedral inside those things.
Also saw these wreaths at Smith’s while out on my sample run one day.
Had to have one. It made our little porch area look so cheery to me!
(Ryan feeling the cheer.)
Decorating the tree! One of my favorite nights of the YEAR. Ryan really did not quite understand how I wanted everything to be perfect – classic Bing Crosby/Nat King/Sinatra/Andy Williams Christmas music playing, lights turned down low, talking about every ornament we were putting up (I will say this till the day I die – thank you Mom, Dad, and grandparents for giving us Krop kids a new ornament each year! I love that our tree is full of a mix of Ryan’s and my childhood ornaments). He was more just like, “I see a bare tree and a box full of ornaments. Let’s just put them on the tree.” But he was a good sport. [:
It was especially fun putting up our more recent ornaments from Europe (an adorable tiny Dutch house from the Dutch Canal Museum, and a Delftware ball with hand-painted tulips on it), and Mexico (our afore-mentioned cactus nativity)! Props to Ryan for dealing with my sentimental nature. I love everything to do with memories and reminiscing. Sigh. 
Not mad about this view.
I kicked myself for not doing Christmas cards for our first Christmas, and so I made sure we whipped up a couple for our closest friends and family this year. I’m a sucker for gold foil and a simple, classy design. I love how they turned out and I loved writing little well-wishes on the back to all the awesome people in our lives. We have a lot of awesome people. We’re so lucky.
We looked good in our Christmasy Sunday best one weekend so we got a picture. [:
We spotted these fabulous ugly sweater kits at Target one night and had to have them. The way Ryan threw himself into designing his was seriously my favorite thing. A crafter at heart? Perhaps. We celebrated their completion by wearing them proudly as we went out to dinner with friends that night (and inviting them to participate with their best Christmas clothing as well). Thai Village didn’t know how to handle the red, green, sparkly awesomeness that hit them.
Decorating Christmas cookies after dinner wrapped up a December Saturday well spent, thanks to my parents' early Christmas gift of tin cookie cutters just like the ones I grew up with. They make my heart happy.
Babysitting this little lady is always a hoot. The games we come up with for her Tsum-Tsums keep us entertained for hours. Also whoever came up with Tsum-Tsums was weird but slightly genius because I’m starting to think they’re pretty dang cute. I blame her. ^^
One of my favorite nights was when we reenacted our first date (three years ago!?) by walking around the Riverwoods Christmas lights! I love this boy! I hope I never forget the memories from that December night three years ago, sitting drinking hot cocoa with this smart, tall, cute, funny boy from the ward. Just asking one another questions about ourselves and laughing about our answers. [: I found out his favorite color was yellow but his favorite color to wear was gray. I don’t know why but I’ll always have that memory. Teehee!
Yee! The Christmas tree started filling up quick! I may or may not have gone a little over budget for Ryan's gifts... ;] I just like spoiling him...
Elder Krop sent us this picture in one of his weekly emails. ): Ahh! I love that dude. Can’t believe he’ll be boarding a plane from South America to Seattle in JUNE!
Tubing at Soldier Hollow was a blast. My cousins and their friends do it every year – rent out the entire tubing hill, buy a LOAD of donuts and hot cocoa, and set everyone free for the night. The icy snow came down the whole time but it was SO MUCH FUN. We did chains, trains, races, snowball fights - the whole nine yards. And had five too many donuts at the end while we warmed up in the lodge and talked. Thanks for an awesome night guys!
Our Christmas tree at the lab. We decorated it like only a week before Christmas, ha!
Finally, Christmas came! We spent it with Ryan’s family. We had a gorgeous white Christmas and it was such a great couple of days. It was cozy and relaxing and full of laughs and food and love! One of the funniest memories was Laura giggling to herself in the kitchen on Christmas Eve while the rest of us watched It’s A Wonderful Life in the family room. We weren’t allowed to see what she was doing, but we found out the next day when Ryan and I literally found cans of cherry pie filling, pouches of Indian food, split pea soup mix, and other completely random stuff in our stockings, courtesy of Laura! We were so confused but we laughed so hard, though probably not as hard as she did. [: 
Ryan gave me THE MOST THOUGHTFUL Christmas gifts. Highlight was definitely a gorgeous black and white map of Amsterdam. I am in love with it. My parents gave us snowshoes(!!!!!), and Rich and Laura gave us a gift card to go to dinner at The Roof in downtown Salt Lake! I have always wanted to go. So excited.
Ryan and I got to talk to my brother for like three minutes and IT WAS SO AWESOME. Ryan laughed super hard when Merr said something in Spanish accidentally. He’s been there. [:
You better believe we used our gift card to The Roof ASAP. Within a couple days after Christmas we had our reservation and made a Christmas date night of it. [:
Temple Square during Christmas is just the best. It was of course SO cold but we bundled up real good and took in all the twinkly lights before heading up to the top of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building for dinner.
When I made our reservation I had jokingly told them to give us the best seat in the house, but they totally did! Our seats were right in the northwest corner, as close to the temple as you could get. Wow. We loved this night so much. So romantic with such a stunning view of the temple. I think I’ve mentioned before how I love being around temples with Ryan. [: He gets all mushy and giddy about us being sealed together forever and it’s the best. Haha! We really enjoyed the delicious buffet and fresh Lion House rolls (anybody who’s been around SLC long enough knows those are to DIE for!), and the live pianist for the evening was stellar. The atmosphere was so classy, my date was real cute, and the conversation just flowed. ;)
We made one last pass through the lights after dinner, walked around City Creek for a bit, and eventually got back to our car full of great food and just really happy to be together. I love date nights with Ryan. [:
(One of my family's Christmas gifts to us was a calendar called Hot Guys and Puppies or something. Ryan pretends to hate it but I think he secretly loves it up on our fridge.)
So December was also a landmark month for us in that we… drumroll please… bought a new car! Woah! Adult things! December had brought just a terrible month of driving conditions for my 40-minute commute over hill and dale, and we were beginning to think that it was time to move on from Ryan’s college car, though he had served us so very well. It hadn’t taken long for us to notice that our little front-wheel-drive guy was not talented in traction or snow handling, especially in the kind of terrain my commute consisted of, so we started casually looking on KSL. Ryan found this cute little 2011 Nissan Rogue totally within our budget with AWD and in great condition. 
We gave it a test drive, and though I took some convincing (I wasn’t exactly smitten with its looks :]) it grew on me and after a couple days of thinking about it, we bought it. So far it has performed so well in the snow, comfort, gas mileage, and stereo capacities and I am one happy commuter. Welcome to the family!
Since Ryan’s parents were headed to California for New Year’s, we flew up to Seattle. I met up with the original core-four for lunch, which was really great. Fun to hear what everyone was up to with school and work and dating and family, and weird to think about how much I’ve changed as a person since high school and seminary, when everything happening then seemed so important. Life is funny. [: These ladies will always be so important to me, and a big part of my life. I love em!
On our free time with my family we bummed around and prepped for the New Year’s Eve extravaganza (Yes, Ryan and I brought our sweaters because they’re crazy awesome and they only got to be shown off once).
Following tradition – a taste test! We tossed around ideas for days before the big night and really could not think of anything worth getting excited about. We’ve covered so many by now! But we ended up going with a taste test of all of the store-bought chocolate-chip cookies my Dad could find. It was EPIC.
If I remember correctly, Chips Ahoy won, which was so weird to us! Definitely not one’s usual reaction to them... Really if this taste test proved anything it’s that pretty much all store-bought chocolate-chip cookies are really just bad, ranging from “Wow this is a packing peanut” to “Yeah if I was just sitting on my butt watching a movie I would probably eat these”, and if you think of them in that spectrum, Chips Ahoy definitely won ‘least nasty.’ So good on you, Chips.
One of our newer favorite games is reverse charades, so LOTS of rounds of that was played. And the classic game of sareivou (still have no idea how to write that mystery French word we use). 
Prepping for the countdown and watching the Space Needle fireworks. It was so fun to be doing what I’ve done on New Year’s for as long as I can remember, all together though lots has changed in our big Conger family. It was so great to be with everyone on my mom’s side. Catching up with Grandma & Grandpa, seeing all the cousins and aunts and uncles. Ryan and I also visited Papa & Nana, my dad’s parents, while we were in town. I love my family.
2015 was a wonderful year. New job for me, a new apartment in a new city, exploring Europe together, relaxing weekends, celebrating our second anniversary, going on adventures with both sides of our family, cruising the Caribbean, and enjoying our second Christmas together. [: Life with Ryan is good.
Then, despite the late night, we continued the Krop tradition of snowshoeing with Papa on New Year’s Day. We drove up to the Paradise side of Mount Rainier, like last year! Warning, there are a lot of pictures of Mount Rainier coming up. It cannot be helped. She is so beautiful.
Stoic Sarah ^^
This mountain. I’ve written about it a lot on here but I just have a lot of feelings. [: It’s the icon of home to me. My dream is to climb it again, but this time with Ryan with us! Has it really been five years since we parked our cars in that very parking lot and climbed this beast? 
I love having Ryan with me while doing the things I grew up doing! 
We slowly made our way up to Mazama Ridge for a stunning lunch spot. The snow was fabulous and the weather couldn’t have been better.
Ah man. She knows she's beautiful. ^^
Not really a great picture of any of us but I love these people. [:
The first day of 2016? Well, well spent.
Another day of the break we spent wandering Seattle. The weather was COLD but the blue sky and sun were perfect. Of course we had to head up through Pike Place to Beecher’s for some hot mac&cheese to warm us up! 
I love this city.
Back at my parents,’ Dad had the fantastic idea to shoot the gingerbread houses they had made for Christmas with his new shotgun. This thing was insane. It looked like a gun out of Halo or something. (Somehow my aim was right on and it was definitely one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.) We shot some slow-motion video too, which was incredible to watch afterwards. The houses were practically vaporized on contact! It was amazing. Ryan and Sarah and I also played around with Sarah's pellet gun. (I leave the nest and suddenly Sarah becomes this modern day Annie Oakley.)
Panda babe and I. I know she looks grumpy but she always is. And it’s the cutest. She’s getting up there in years and isn’t doing so well, so we had lots of cuddles and kisses while I was there. I love this cupcake.
Back in Utah. We loved all the family time we got over the holidays! Life is good.
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