Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Well, and Merry Christmas to you too! Part II

Christmas Day!!

Traditions are meant for the holidays. Ours have evolved into some really special Christmases. It all starts with Christmas Eve when we attend one of the early evening mass times (midnight mass is *not* an option for us), take a longer ride home and look at the Christmas lights and oooh and aahhh over them. Then when we get home, we change into our new Christmas jammies, say our evening prayers, pick our one gift to open and then go to bed and wait for the real fun to start the next day.

***

On Christmas Day, the kids know to wait for us to get up. Neil and I have our coffee, the kids have their hot cocoa. We have bagels and cream cheese - nothing too heavy to interfere with the task at hand...all the gift opening!! It took us the better part of two hours to open all the gifts. After the gift opening, we spent the day lounging in our jammies, playing with all our newfound loot and watching movies that we received as gifts. We got The Ultimate Gift from Grandma and Paka and decided to watch it. What an awesome movie!! We also watched A Christmas Story and one other movie that escapes me right now. We had a really nice dinner too. A spiral ham, loaded mashed potatoes (milk, butter, shredded cheese, ranch dressing and bacon crumbles), King's Hawaiian Rolls (if you've never had these, they are similar to the ones you can find at Logan's or Texas Roadhouse), and a Caesar salad. Yummo!!

Needless to say, it was a perfect day. Though I don't have pictures of it, Neil and I got ourselves a new knife set. Our gifts usually lean towards practicality but I have to say I was stoked to get it since our previous set couldn't cut a balloon, lol. I've never seen such a clean cut!!

Enjoy the photos! :)


{Paige with one of her stocking stuffers}

{Typical Jonathan pose screams CHEEEEEESE!}

{She told me I could take the picture as long as she could turn around}

{Yup, this is pretty much what our morning looked like for two hours - a blur of wrapping paper}

{Paige shows one of her gifts from Santa; the other was a St. Therese doll}

{Drew sizes up his new BlaBla doll}

{Click HERE to find something cute from BlaBla for your little one}

{Paige brought this home from preschool but was so anxious for us to open it, we saw it days after her last class of the year. It's her tiny hand print on an oven mitt}

{Each report card, Ashley can earn up to $10 per academic class. This last report card, she earned $30 and wasted no time deciding on spending her hard earned money on gifts for her siblings. She bought this foil teddy bear ballerina that you can color for Paige. The kids all worked really hard on it and I couldn't resist standing on the coffee table to capture this great memory.}

3 comments:

Amanda said...

Your traditions sound wonderful. It must me nice to be able to be at home on Christmas instead of driving all over creation to visit relatives.

I am so jealous.

Amanda said...

Sorry that was supposed to be "be" instead of "me".

Kelly Deneen Raymond said...

What a fun day! It sounds like it was just perfect. :)

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