Christmas Eve

Here are a couple of fun pictures from Christmas Eve. We had a few friends over and a semi-traditional dinner (the pies were traditional, at least!) It was so lovely to have some real Christmas spirit in our home, especially when we sang carols for a while. Remarkably, the kids played happily downstairs while we sang upstairs, so we got to run through quite a few favorites before our voices wore out. (Thanks, Mark, for hanging out with the kids!) I miss my favorite carols, so it was a treat to sing so many.

We've never done this before, but since the kids needed new jammies anyway, we wrapped up a new set for each of them and let them open them before bedtime. I know lots of families love to do this; we'll have to decide whether to add it as a tradition or not. They were definitely excited to open one gift the night before! And it's really cute to have the kids in matching PJs. We told them to put their heads together and look cute. This was the result.

We also acted out the Christmas story -- it was a bit random, but lots of fun. We had one friend film it for us; I'll have to check out the footage soon. When I was in about the second verse of the story, the wise man (M) yelled out, "I have to go potty!" But this hilarious feat was probably beat by the V and V show -- our V and our friend, who is the same age, but smaller, acted as Joseph and the donkey. (Another mom played Mary.) Our V was sad that we let another girl wear the purple angel wings, but finally cheered up and announced that she would play the donkey. Her buddy wanted to ride on her, which she was fine with (?!?) He kind of straddled his legs around her back and walked along with her, so in our version Joseph got a ride and poor Mary walked the whole way. On her knees. Christmas morning pics to come soon.