Phoenix Wedding Photographer shoots United Blood Services holiday blood drive.

As you can probably tell, I’m busy playing catch up on my blog from all the holiday activities. This is my 4th blog in 3 days with several more to come!

Before the Christmas bustle even began, I was busy planning an event for United Blood Services as part of my day job. The event was a big community blood drive hosted by the Phoenix Coyotes at Jobing.com Arena in Glendale.

As you may know, the holiday season is traditionally one of the most diffucult times of the year to maintain the blood supply for Arizona hospitals. With many regular donors vacationing and keeping busy with holiday preparations, blood donations tend to decline. What most people don’t realize is that it takes over 700 blood donors A DAY to maintain our state’s blood supply and that doesn’t exclude the holidays!

The event at Jobing.com was held in an effort to vamp up the blood supply for the holiday season. The event was a huge success! Over 1oo people came out to donate. I was in charge of the event, so I didn’t have much time for a lot of shooting, but I did get some fun shots here and there. Here’s a few of my favorites:

The Coyotes provided this super fun inflatable slapshot for our kids area. Here’s one of our volunteers testing his skills.

Here’s a shot of some of our staff hard at work.

A hockey league practiced on the arena floor while our staff ate lunch.

Thanks to all those who came out to give blood! It was really fun to see all the holiday spirit . . .

. . . and the Coyotes fans too!

Our talented graphic designer Chris, had taken time off for the holidays, but he and his wife Lori came by to donate at the event.

Overall, it was a great event and most importantly, over a hundred donations were made that will benefit Arizona hospital patients.

For more information about blood donation, visit www.UnitedBloodServicesAZ.org.

Phoenix Wedding Photographers celebrate the holidays with one final hurrah!

For our final holiday get together, we headed over to Ryan’s mom, Lanie’s house for Christmas dinner with the family. Lanie’s a really good cook. She whipped up an awesome pork roast that was a huge hit! After the delicious dinner we spent the evening hanging out with the family and opening presents.

Here’s a shot of my Dad helping Lanie in the kitchen.

Grandma Margie – lovingly known to us as “MGM”

Since there’s no kids (yet) at our holiday functions, we like to bring along Molly for the added entertainment. Besides, there’s always room for this kind of cuteness!

Apparently, she enjoys presents too!

One of me and the Pup . . .

Christy, Johnny and Ryan

Here’s Johnny showing off one of his gifts.

Overall, it was another wonderful Christmas! To all our friends and family: we love you and we’re so glad we had the chance to spend these times together! Happy New Year to all!

Phoenix Wedding Photographers celebrate Christmas . . . some more!

Our next holiday function took place at our house on Christmas Eve. It was a great night – very fun and casual with just a couple members from each side of the family. In the interest of keeping things casual, I left the camera in the office for the evening.

On Christmas day, we had two parties to attend. The first one was at my Grandma’s house. The highlight was probably my Grandma’s new puppy, Kirby. She just recently brought him home from a trip to visit my Aunt in Oregon. He’s a SUPER cute Shitzu-Maltese puppy! We spent a lot of our time there petting an playing with him. My sister Cheri even bought him a “Punk Puppy” sweatshirt for Christmas! He looked a little rediculous, but it was still REALLY CUTE!

Here’s a shot of him modeling his new outfit.

And here’s my Grandma with her new little bundle of joy.

Here’s my sister Amy and her husband Jim opening up presents. Jim HATES to smile for pictures, so it’s always a challenge to catch him when he’s not paying attention.

It was great spending time with everybody! Another fun party.