California Christmas Vacation

This year for the holidays, we went to southern California. My sister lives in Los Angeles, and my grandparents live in Laguna Niguel. My grandparents cancelled at the last minute coming east for last year's Christmas, so this year we came to them.

I was with my sister and her boyfriend for a few days before the rest of our family flew in. Other than seeing "Love Actually Live" (read that blog post here), we mostly hung out at their apartment watching Christmas movies like Elf, Home Alone, The Santa Clause, and the new Netflix animated film Klaus. But we did go out for ice cream to Wanderlust; I saw the owner of the shop featured in a Try Guys video (here), and since it was only about 20 minutes away, we just had to try it! I tried a hazelnut flavor, and my sister got the ube flavor.

My sister and I also did a lot of baking:

Chocolate peppermint cake. SO good!

My sister insisted that we do fancy cookie decorating. I'm surprised how nice they look!

My parents rented an AirBNB in Carlsbad for the whole family, so we headed there on Monday. It was really nice! It was perfect for just hanging out as a family. We walked around the town of Carlsbad as well, doing a wine tasting at the Witch Creek Winery tasting room (which features Sleepy Tiger Wines, related to Sleepy Tiger Coffee), walking around checking out all the cute shops (I bought a pair of snakeskin-printed jeggings from Blues and Shoes), and eating gelato at Gelato Love (the chocolate banana flavor and eggnog flavor were really good!). We also walked along the beach in Carlsbad and visited Hosp Grove Park to get some nature time in. It felt so good to get outside and be in the sunshine. Weather.com had predicted rain for the time I was there, but it mostly only rained at night, which meant we could get outside during the day.

Our Hanukkah bush!

My sister's boyfriend with our itty-bitty Christmas tree.

There was a lot of cool wall art in Carlsbad:

On our last day in California, my parents and I stayed in Dana Point. We had a picnic of our Christmas leftovers by the beach before walking along the coast and doing some more shopping.

I'm flying home today. Sad to see this trip end, but I'm off to New Hampshire tomorrow for Vacation Part II! Stay tuned for that blog post!