Christmas Eve 2012

It's Christmas Eve!

We spent the previous Christmas Eve 2011 with our good friends the Davis', Aanderuds and Balmforths. This year we got together again the night before Christmas Eve, along with the Childs and one of the Davis' neighbors. We had a little gift activity for the kids, lots of treats and visiting, and then the adults sang carols together while the children watched a Christmas movie. We had a great time. We have such great friends here.

Dan Child, Paul Aanderud, Jed, Randy Balmforth, and Trevor Davis.

On Christmas Eve we had our traditional dinner of Chicken a la King (Chicken for the King) served in bread crowns, with our candles and Christmas tablecloth. Last year one of the candles lit the cloth napkin on fire that held all the bread crowns. Sammy, who was only 21 months old at the time, was the one who notified us all that the napkin was on fire! It makes me laugh just remembering it! :) My wood bowl still has a few scars on it from the episode. Needless to say, I kept a close eye on the candles this year. hehe!

 We received a Christmas package form my Mom on Christmas Eve, and she included a foam Gingerbread House craft for us to do. We had fun doing it as part of our celebration that night. :)

 Charlotte sucks her two middle fingers with her hand twisted backwards. Isn't that funny?

We read Christmas stories together, including The Man Who Missed Christmas and Christmas Day in the Morning, which are the ones we always saved for Christmas Eve when I was growing up. :)

We listened to the audio of the book The Polar Express while Jed turned the pages. 

Usually we each have our own bell to ring at the end of the book, but this year I had taken all our jingle bells off our Christmas tree to use in Primary during Singing Time and had left them at the church on accident. So we had to take turns with this one jingle bell!

 

We went outside to sprinkle reindeer food on the grass. This is a MUST for leading those reindeer to our house! We had so much of it from friends and classroom parties, that the reindeer would have probably still been grazing in our lawn in the morning if Santa hadn't urged them onward after he got through with our house. :)

When we went outside, we discovered that it would be a white Christmas after all! Yippee!

Leave it to Dad to start a snowball fight! Ben quickly forgot about wanting to feed reindeer for the more immediate desire of retaliation!

 

The kids got ready for bed and then we watched the five-minute Nativity video produced by the Church, that is so realistic and wonderful, and we read Luke 2 from the Bible. Then we said prayers, set out our Christmas stockings, and tucked the kids into bed.  While we waited for the kids to fall fast asleep, Jed and I watched 'A Christmas Carol' with George C. Scott playing Ebeneezer Scrooge. I absolutely love that movie! I was so excited to watch it again, snuggled up with Jed! I look forward to that so much every year.

We had a great Christmas Eve!