Christmas Celebrations

GR spent Christmas Eve morning at work, coming home after lunch to find that the kids had done a beautiful job of decorating the tree. I thought I'd snapped a picture or two, but they are no where to be found. They had a lot of fun recognizing the different decorations they've added to our collection over the years.

Diane's church did a Children's Christmas Eve service at 4pm. Singing carols and reading (and acting out) the prophets accounts of the Saviors birth has always been a part of my families Christmas Eve tradition, so to be able to merge the two traditions and attend a beautiful Christmas Eve service where the Nativity story was told and children were encouraged to participate, and favorite carols were sung, with family was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon.



After the service, we filled our bellies with one of Diane's amazing dinners and then headed for home to set out stockings, feed the reindeer, wrap more gifts and catch some shuteye so we could enjoy the next morning.

Christmas Day was really nice and laid back. Santa filled the kids stockings with all the traditional things - an orange in the toe (a tradition handed down from my father's mothers family), a few chocolates, a small box of special sugared cereal, and books, toys, tatoos, etc. to play with throughout the morning. The reindeer left scrumptious donuts as a thank you to the children for the yummy food, which ended up being breakfast ... more on that in a bit. And Santa was kind enough to deliver all our packages to Grandma's so we could mosey over there mid-morning after enjoying stockings and breakfast at our house.

Alex woke up Christmas morning at 5:30 screaming and didn't really let up until he simply didn't have the energy to scream any more and started to drift off to sleep around 9. So our grand plans of large super scrumptious gourmet breakfast of waffles, scrambled eggs, and sausage were completely forgotten as GR and I traded off trying to hold and comfort a baby who would have none of either. Thankfully, the super scrumptious and massive donuts the reindeer brought more than filled the children until lunchtime.

Everyone made out like bandits with their gifts getting at least one or two prized items from their wish lists. And despite my worst fears, no one was disappointed, making all the stress and fretting and worry worth it.

After cleaning up the wrapping and eating a bit of lunch, we spent our afternoon hours disassembling boxes and packaging and assembling toys, inserting batteries and doing our best to help and comfort Alex who didn't wander far from a loving lap.

Diane found some wonderful English Crackers for our Christmas Dinner. They contained musical horns, each tuned to one of eight notes, and sheet music to play 16 or so basic Christmas Carols (Jingle Bells and The First Noel) and other simple songs (Happy Birthday). It took some practice and serious concentration on the part of some to make our little horn group turn out recognizable music, but after a couple of practice rounds, we were successful in playing We Wish You a Merry Christmas. It was so much fun! Diane suggested we take the horns to St. Louis later this week and use them with my siblings and I thought that was an excellent idea.