Travel-Trotter

By Mirabelle

You may have heard the song “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” Well, I think there is. And it is California! On our way to Baja Mexico, we stopped at my Grandma’s house for Christmas. We stayed there for 10 days, and we mostly just spent time at Oma’s house because California had a stay-at-home order because of COVID. Luckily Oma is a doctor and got her first vaccine shot while we were there.

We were able to get a Christmas tree by going to a Christmas Tree farm in the Santa Cruz mountains near her house. We took a twisting road up to the farm. Once we got there, we looked around and we hiked up a hill to find our tree. I helped my dad cut it down. We brought it back to Oma’s house and put it up and put on the ornaments. I got to put the angel on the top of the tree.

On Christmas eve eve, we made lefse and sausage for dinner, which is a tradition from my dad’s family. Lefse is a norweigian potato bread – kind of like a pancake but made with potatoes. In Wisconsin you can buy Lefse at the store, but we couldn’t find it in California, so we had to make it for the first time. Caroline helped peel potatoes, dad mashed them, and mom cooked the bread. It wasn’t quite like we are used to, but it was still delicious. We wrapped up little sausages, or just had butter and cinnamon sugar. Mmmm!

On Christmas eve we had a big dinner with crab legs, and we got to open a few presents, including a game called Exploding Kittens. I liked it a lot. We also got to open a rock-painting kit from our grandma.

On Christmas morning, we came to wake up our parents early, and then we got to open presents. Me and my siblings got hoverboards which we were really excited to play with. We rode them to the park. The rest of the day we had lots of fun hanging out with our family and cooking dinner.

The rest of our time there we went on lots of walks and hoverboard rides, and spent time with our grandma, Oma, and went in the hot tub. The pool was super cold but we jumped in it a few times too!