Our Favourite Christmas Moments

Ooops... I didn't mean to fall off the face of the blogosphere for the past week and a half. We've been busy celebrating Christmas, hanging out with family, working (for Dave and I), and enjoying lots of Oma and Opa time.

Since Mom and Dad drove here they brought along some fairly random things -- like their pasta maker! We had a couple of excellent meals of pasta made by Opa, Sam, and Rachel.

On the Wednesday before Christmas we celebrated with my mom's side of the family. The kids had so much fun they begged for a sleepover with their second cousins. My cousin said it was okay so Sam and Rachel partied with them until 1am. I guess second cousins, Doritos, and popcorn don't add up to a lot of sleep. That's why Rachel crashed in the Chariot when we grabbed some last minute groceries on Christmas Eve!

I love going to the Christmas Eve service at our church. It is just so beautiful. We sing carols and read the nativity story from the Bible and it's just amazing. My favourite moment was when Rachel went to sit with good friends of ours and Karen had her son and Rachel on her lap with two candles and the kids were just mesmerized.

After the service we changed into pajamas and had cheese and crackers and stuffed mushrooms. Rachel made the cracker tray. And then Opa read about half of "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" out loud to Sam and Rachel. This is becoming one of our traditions.

Unlike the rest of the world, our kids are not early morning Christmas risers. I think Sam was the first one up at about 8:45am and the rest of us soon followed. And then, after our traditional Christmas morning picture, it was present time.

Sam's favourite present was either his baseball glove...

...or the Baseball Monopoly game which Dave made for him. (I'm getting Dave to write a whole separate blog post on how he did it. Look for that coming in a few weeks. Probably!)

I gave Dave an adult colouring book and he will get hours (and hours and hours and ...) of fun out of it!

Dave gave me a new mug. And I got a few hours to read blogs and hang laundry out (!!!) so my Christmas was complete :)

Rachel got some craft projects and got to paint Dave's nails so she was thrilled! In fact, everyone got painted nails on Christmas Day, except for my dad, even though Rachel pronounced, "You will not have the most special Christmas ever if you don't have nailpolish Opa!"

And our weather on Christmas Day was so crazy that the kids played outside for awhile in the afternoon.

Then we had our turkey dinner which was mostly made by my mom and dad. It was delicious.

Sam got a new game for Christmas (Skip-Bo) and so, besides eating a lot of good food, we've been playing a lot of that. Mom also fixed a very special quilt of mine and some of Rachel's jeans.

And yesterday morning, after a one day delay due to freezing rain, Mom and Dad left. I went back to work, and just like that, our Christmas holidays were over.

I hope you all had good Christmases too. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to try and blog a little more (ha!) so check back tomorrow for my highlights of 2015.