Greetings to all this Christmas evening! We have had an exciting day here -- I love the contagious excitement of children at Christmastime. Since I have a TON of pictures I want to share, I thought I would post a little here about our overall traditions and then do a separate post about each of the kids this year. (That way there isn't one huge long post and I can tell you more about each kid!)
Our Christmas Eve traditions involve usually watching/reading something on the birth of Christ (this year we watched the church's "Joy to the World" DVD). Then we get out the stockings to hang up over the fireplace.
That's always followed by a picture of the kids in front of the stockings:
This year I decided to start a new tradition I had read about. Each year, we will give each kid a special ornament and somehow mark it with the year and perhaps their name or initials. They hang it on the tree and then maybe even store all of "their" ornaments in a special box. When they leave home, they will have their own box of ornaments to take with them! Since I didn't get the ornaments this year until after we had decorated the tree, I decided to wait until Christmas Eve to give them to the kids.
(You can read more about Hannah's reaction in her individual post.)
After the stockings, the kids get out our "Cookies for Santa" plate and choose a couple of sugar cookies to leave. They also sometimes like to leave notes for Santa next to the cookies (see McKay's post for info about his note). Then it's off to bed!
Here's our tree (taken with no flash) on Christmas Eve...
In the morning, we tell the kids they can't go downstairs until we're all ready (although a couple of them snuck downstairs briefly this morning, I was told). As you might expect, they are just as anxious as can be to come down! I think we held them off this morning until about 7:00am or so.
They run down to see what Santa left in their stockings...
...and under the tree...
After they get down their stockings and check out what's there, they choose their spot on the floor and sort out the presents.
We take turns opening presents (because I love to watch them open each one) and are left with a huge mess by the end of the day!
One of the "big" presents for all the kids this year was a Nintendo 64 system. You might not think an old used Nintendo 64 is anything to get excited about, but our kids were thrilled because we have never had a video game system before. They've only been able to play video games when we visit relatives (and oh -- they've felt so deprived!). I saw a good deal on a used one a few months that had several games, so we gave in and bought it. It turned out to be definitely used and not in the best condition, but we were able to get it to work. (And Brian's been working on cleaning the games a little more tonight and that seems to be helping a bunch.)
McKay & Hannah are the most excited about the Nintendo. Courtney likes to play some, too, but she gets easily frustrated with the games and not being able to "win" all the time. Hayley is not interested at this point. She's got more exciting things to play with. :-)
Christmas Day also means no cooking for me -- it's leftovers all the way! We have a big dinner on Christmas Eve (ham, homemade rolls, potato casserole, cranberry punch, etc.) so there are plenty of leftovers to munch on the next day.
Now I have to get busy finding places to put all this "stuff"!
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