Christmas At Our House

Merry Christmas to everyone!! This year we spent Christmas here at home. We had some of our family over for Christmas Eve and spent the evening eating, sharing stories, singing, visiting, and playing. After our family went home we hung the stockings with the kids and read/told the Christmas story.

I stayed up until 2am to get everything perfect for Christmas morning. It was a wonderful morning. The kids woke up about 7:30 am and came into our room asking us if Santa had come. Jakob told us it was the best Christmas ever as he was pulling things from his stocking. Steve and I made biscuits and gravy for breakfast. After we ate we read the Christmas story again and opened our presents. Karter did not want to open his gifts. We tried to get him interested, but he wanted nothing to do with unwrapping his gifts. We ended up opening them and giving the presents to him. When he finally saw the unwrapped gift he got excited and started playing with it. What a character!!

The kid’s made handmade gifts for each other this Christmas. I think the best gifts of the morning were these special gifts they had made. I loved that they were able to enjoy and feel the spirit of giving as they gave what they had worked so hard on. This will definitely be a yearly tradition.

After the gifts were opened we spent a quiet morning putting Isabelle’s doll house together, shooting nerf guns, building Star Wars legos, and just hanging out. It was quiet, peaceful, and happy. Just how Christmas should be.

Later that afternoon we went out to Forest Grove to go to a Family Christmas Party. It was fun to see everyone and eat yummy, yummy food!

I told Steve yesterday that this is the first time in a long time that I have felt that we were able to celebrate the season the way I hoped we would. It has seemed for the last few years that every season has been so busy I just couldn’t do what I planned to do. This Christmas I have felt really good about how we celebrated. Not that it was perfect or that we did absolutely everything on our list, but we were able to fully enjoy every aspect of the season. I think the main thing is I was able to simplify the gift giving/crafting/food making/decorating craziness, having enough time for quiet moments of focusing on the true meaning of Christmas. We were able to celebrate the birth of our Savior, focusing on Him and all the blessing He has given to us. It was a lovely Christmas.