12.25.09
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
What a change from last year! We were in Germany with our two sons. We had a lovely time, but we missed being with the rest of the family. Last night we spent Christmas Eve with most of the family and had a really nice program. We actually used the program our ward choir presented last year, with a few modifications to make it short enough for the kids. It was fun to have the children dress up and participate. I was glad that Hayden (15) and Porter (13) were not too cool to dress up with their siblings. Hayden was a very buff angel and Porter a well-dressed king. Regan was Mary, Turner was Joseph, Landon a shepherd and Cooper was a lamb. We took pictures, but I’m not going to post them here. We sang around the piano and played Uncle Wiggly. We also showed Turner and Regan where Santa was with the NORAD Santa tracker, very fun to have believers in the house. I read a story at the end to get everyone settled down and the Oliver’s went home and eventually to bed. Apparently the story didn’t do the trick because Turner didn’t go to sleep and today he was grouchy.
We got up and I fixed a breakfast of pancakes, sausage, bacon and eggs. The Nadeau’s arrived and they ate too and then we all sat down in the downstairs family room and opened the funny gifts this year. They were all nicely down, even though some of them were last minute, nobody had just a piece of paper to read. I think the biggest laughs came with Carolyn’s gift from Leslie which chronicled some of the naughty things Rose has done this last year in the style of the No David books, very funny. We also laughed at Mark’s gift from Dixon about dating, it was a multimedia presentation that made him laugh so he didn’t mind too much.
We then went upstairs and opened regular gifts and everyone was excited. We all enjoyed that even though it got kind of crazy and we had to ask after about what others got. It is too hard to ask the children to wait to open gifts while someone else opens a gift.
We had the roast in the oven and almost forgot we had other food to cook, but quickly got that done and everything served by two. I like to eat early in the day because then the kids don’t snack as much. I would have liked the food to be ready at 12 or 12:30, maybe next year. We didn’t play games in the afternoon, but we spent some time singing songs and playing with the children. Turner was really grouchy and hard to manage, the rest of the children did great, though we did have some tears here and there and Carolyn will be able to add three pages to her No Rose book.
My house needs some attention, but not tonight. Dale and I will tackle it tomorrow. We have New Years to look forward to next week, although I doubt if we will have any family that evening. Right after that we leave on our cruise, and I am really looking forward to a week of reading and resting.