Saturday, April 12, 2014

Family Christmas

Christmas Eve and Christmas morning are our family times.  We spend it together, just the eight of us, in a fairly regular routine.  Christmas Eve wraps up, post-eating and post-Holiday Inn watching, with the sprinkling of the sparkle oats on the lawn (the brown lawn, as you can see, it's almost never a white Christmas here, but on the flip side, it's not too cold either, as you can see based upon Colin's short sleeves).  Then everyone slumber parties in our room and gathers at the top of the stairs before we "release the hounds".  Usually we've got one or two grumpy kiddos who didn't get enough sleep, and, judging by the picture, that role was played by Ian and Cecily this year.  In all seriousness, though, we are blessed to be able to provide a veritable wealth of Christmas presents for the kids, and we don't take that for granted at all.  This year we instituted a new tradition - three presents for each child.  If it was enough for Jesus, it should certainly be enough for us.  It was refreshing - gift-opening wasn't so overwhelming and there wasn't as much mess to clean up afterwards.  We are definitely going to incorporate that into our annual traditions.

Allegra in the spirit on Christmas Eve

The kids sprinkling sparkle oats for Santa's reindeer

My daughter being goofy

The trips ready and waiting for the okay to descend the stairs on Christmas morning

Stocking fun

More stockings

The rest of the bunch with their stockings

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