Our Family Christmas

Since we often travel over Christmas, we have our family Christmas at home a couple of days early. This year, we celebrated on the 23^rd.

On our Christmas Eve, Josiah fixed a plate for Santa, complete with a carrot for Rudolph and a handwritten note (click on the picture to enlarge it if you can’t read the note.)

On Christmas morning, everyone was up before the sun to share our gifts!

But first, we needed a picture of everyone. J

Zack had been hanging around the tree, laying over the heater, and jumping in and around the boxes. When I showed him a brand new toy mouse that squeaks when you shake it, his little eyes got SO BIG. He played with it the rest of the morning!

The boys opening gifts.

One of the gifts for us girls was hidden under the basement Christmas tree. We were very excited to receive new bookshelves for our rooms!

We were blessed with a sprinkling of snow to make our Christmas picture perfect.

Christmas is a happy chaos of opening gifts, throwing wrapping paper bombs at each other, and enjoying the celebration together!

For breakfast, we had our traditional French toast casserole along with eggs, oranges, and orange juice. It was tasty and filling! Before we ate, we celebrated the culmination of advent and lit the Christ candle in the center of our wreath. We then sang “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” How wonderful to celebrate the glorious day when our Savior entered this world in the flesh!

The rest of the day was spent enjoying our gifts. We girls helped Daddy assemble our shelves and reorganized our books. No more book piles on the floor and cramming my other shelf!

Christmas dinner started with artichoke dip crostini. It was delicious!

The table all set and ready for food!

On the menu was parmesan chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed vegetables, and more artichoke dip crostini.

The desserts were too plentiful to name, and included a sampling of all our Christmas baking this month! Nobody went hungry, that’s for sure!

After all the festivities, it was time to clean up and finish packing for phase 2 of our Christmas celebrations. To be continued. . .