Christmas Eve & Christmas 2010

Yikes! It's March. I need to get faster at my back-bloggin! :)

We had a great Christmas Eve this year. In some ways, I think I love Christmas Eve almost as much as Christmas. For our family, it's an entire day spent together as a family, spent close to the Savior, with many fun activities.

We started out the day by meeting Josh's sister Melissa and her family at an early matinee movie at the theater. We saw the movie "Tangled" which was really cute. We started this little tradition with them last year and it has been really fun. :)

After we got home, we had lunch, then started making our traditional cookies for Santa Clause! This year we did peanut butter blossoms. They turned out really yummy.

After that we went out and delivered some Christmas goodies to our neighbors. We made our hot fudge sauce again this year. This time Josh ended up making it while I worked on some other Christmas goodies.

After we got home from our deliveries we put together our Christmas Eve dinner. It's been our tradition the last few years to have a cheese tray with a few "exotic" cheeses (and a couple of not so exotic ones) fruit and crackers.

After dinner we all gathered near our Christmas tree. We read from the bible of the birth of Christ and discussed it with the kids. Isaac & Parker amaze me at how much they already know of the scripture stories and how much they truly understand. It's always neat to talk to them about them. As we talked about Jesus' birth, the kids got out a little nativity that we have and we sort of acted out the story. It made it really fun.

Afterward we opened our Christmas Eve gift (new pajamas!), and the kids went to bed excited for Santa to come. :)

I think it's funny because so far we've always had to wake up our kids on Christmas morning. LOL But we got them up and went downstairs to see if Santa Clause came!

The stockings were full!

And he definitely came!

We had hamsters in our Christmas tree:

Checking out the cool stuff Santa brought:

Isaac got some new Pokemon cards & a binder to

store them in. I mentioned Isaac has been on a

pineapple kick lately? He asked Santa for a pineapple

this year (LOL). Not sure if he was serious, but

Santa came through! Haha

Bryce loved his car ramp toy:

And he got his own scooter this year!

Parker's our video game boy. He got a Sonic

game for our Wii.

We pretty much just spent the day playing and being together. It was nice not having to go anywhere. For our Christmas dinner we had Shrimp, sour cream potatoes, spinach artichoke dip with veggies, a jello salad, and sparkling apple cranberry juice.

A couple of days after Christmas we made the trip to southern Utah to visit both my and Josh's parents. We stopped in Loa to visit my parents first, then headed down to St. George to visit Josh's parents. We beat the snow storms, and had a good time seeing everyone and celebrating Christmas with them.

I took picture of everyone's gifts. :) The kids always have fun looking back at these years later. Not sure if anyone else cares about looking at them though. LOL!

Josh got a food dehydrator, a campfire popcorn popper, a wheatgrass juicer,

a newspaper log maker, some five-finger shoes (not pictured) and a few other things.

Family gifts: a trampoline! (not pictured), Mario Kart &

Wheel of Fortune for Wii,

some new board games, & a couple of other things:

Bryce got a car ramp toy, a scooter, some Zhu Zhu pets

a Sing-a-ma-jig, new blocks and more:

Isaac got a binder & more Pokemon cards,

a Kung fu hamster set, a camera, an electadoodle,

the Percy Jackson book set, & more:

Parker got a Zhu Zhu pet set, a Hot Wheels set,

a Moon Dough set, an electadoodle, his Sonic game

and more:

I got way too spoiled this year! I got a Kitchenaid mixer,

a Macbook (big surprise from Josh :)), and an Emrod fishing pole: