Christmas 2014

Christmas

Part I

We had a fantastic Christmas this year...well anything would be an improvement over the big Christmas Barf-Fest of 2013. But seriously, we had a wonderful holiday. For whatever reason this year the Christmas season didn't seem as rushed and hectic and that was a wonderful gift of the season to all of us.

This year we had Christmas Eve at our house and then went up to my mom's house on Christmas Day to meet up with Kelley and Elle. Then the day after Christmas, Kirk, his fiance Meki, and Kayia drove up from Utah for a week. It was wonderful!! Reilly's boyfriend, Justin, was with us off and on also.

We had a wonderful Christmas Eve dinner of all sorts of good things...like lobster!! Delish. You might be wondering "Is that Tyler in a hideous turtleneck?" Why yes, yes it is, to my great dismay. I thoroughly hate turtlenecks and thought that all had been banished from our home but on Christmas Eve Tyler unearthed one from who knows where and thought it would be funny to...in a Clark Griswold sort of way...put it on and come to the table. But then...he liked it little too much. He wore it all night.

After dinner the kids put on a little Christmas program. Ailey, Bryn and Kameron had been working on it all day. I thought it turned out spectacularly...there was singing, dancing, trumpet playing, and all kinds of good things.

Kameron played multiple Christmas carols on his trumpet which sounded great!!

Ailey sang a few songs for us as well. Very lovely.

Bryn sang a cute solo and then Bryn and Ailey sang a duet.

There was even a family band rendition of Jingle Bells with Kam on the trumpet, Ailey on the toy drum, and Bryn on the jingle bells. Pure awesomeness.

Reilly did a dramatic reading and was the narrator for our Christmas Nativity Pageant.

We had a beautiful angel:

Mary and Baby Jesus:

Joseph:

They did a fantastic job!!

Turtlenecks for days...have you had enough of it yet? 

And then the REAL Christmas caroling began...toy drum. maracas, and all. Sing it baby!!

A good time was had by all!!

Then it was jammie time!!

The timer on my IPhone just doesn't do a good job, and digging out my other camera and tripod wasn't happening, so these will have to do.

We had our usual Christmas jammie fashion show which I will spare you the video of...yes, I was a part of it too!! Then we turned out all the lights including the tree and read the scriptures by candlelight and walked each child to bed also by candlelight. Our kids love this!!

Christmas morning dawned a beautiful, sunny, snow-free day and I wasn't complaining one bit. It was a gorgeous Christmas day. Santa treated us all very well this year.

We had a fantastic morning and enjoyed a delicious and leisurely Christmas breakfast. Then we played this:

Little did we know that this game would take over our entire Christmas break and become our game of choice and a family obsession. Have you taken the Bean Boozled challenge?

Stay tuned...