I love Christmas, mostly.

* Beware, this post is long but it's my Christmas journal entry, so I had to write in all the details. I won't feel bad if you don't read all of it *

Dec 24- Christmas Eve
For Christmas this year it was my family's turn, so we spent Christmas Eve with them and part of Christmas day. On Christmas Eve, we went to my grandma Freda's house for our traditional get-together. The food was delicious and it was so fun to play games and chat with everyone. We have always had a tradition of opening those Christmas cracker things that have a crown and prize inside. This year though, the cracker's were way nice and all our crowns were gold! We're living large!

We also had a new addition to dinner this year thanks to Stacie- this awesomely creative soda bar. My drink choice was Fresca with a lime and pomegranates.
After dinner we played the present game (yankee swap, etc.)- twice. Once with white elephant presents and then again with good presents. For the white elephant gifts, I got a candle which was a good gift, but Brody ended up with these lovely (used) things...
Here's some other awesome white elephant items-It's so fun to have some young little cousins around during Christmas and other family get-together's. My cousin Jaxon is 3, Avery is 1, and Sidnie is almost 1. So we had a lot of fun with them.

Me and Jake with Sidnie

Avery

Jaxon is one of the cutest and funniest little boys I have ever met! He kept us entertained for a while by making some weird dragon noises and these funny faces...

I think one of the funniest parts of the night was when my aunt Jessica was trying to take a picture of her daughter Avery with all the presents, but she wouldn't smile, so me, Jake, Tommy and Jessica (my sis) all tried to help. Here's what we came up with....
And here's the reaction we got from Avery...
Each year, my grandma has so many presents under her tree, it's ridiculous! I couldn't even fit them all in the picture.

After our party at grandma's house, we went to my parents for our own Christmas Eve celebration. We've started a few new traditions of our own which have all been very fun. We start the night off by doing a few things to help us remember the true meaning of Christmas. This year, we all went into a dark room and my dad talked about the signs of Christ's death, one of which being darkness. He then went on to talk about how Christ is the Light of the world and how we can let his light shine through us. My mom then gave us all a lit candle and played a song from the Forgotten Carol's- Arise and Shine Forth which talks about just that.We then exchanged our gifts to the person who's name we drew and then played a few games- The pickle find game which is always fun and our 2nd annual family trivia game. Dad came in first and picked, for his prize, the extremely soft, green (my favorite color), cuddly blanket that I had my eye on. I acted sad about it- mostly as a joke, but I guess I went too far because my dad ended up giving it to me. Then, I felt so bad for being such a whiner that I didn't want it, but he wouldn't take it back. So now every time I use it, I'm reminded of how selfish and whiney I was. Its great. And it's pretty sad too but maybe now I'll try harder to let things go and not complain. I really do appreciate him giving it to me though, and I LOVE it!

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Dec 25- Christmas Day
Christmas morning, Brody, surprisingly, woke me up around 8 (this is VERY unusual for him) because he was so excited. He had a surprise present for me (a hot chocolate maker that mixes it for you and puts it at exactly the right temperature with just one touch of a button. It's so awesome!) that he'd been ecstatic about for almost a month. (This excessive excitement was probably because last year half my present's were IOU's). So we did our own thing at our house first, including socks and all other presents. We've decided to make it a tradition to fill each others (and our kids when we have them) socks with all food items but one. That way, we won't have to stress with finding enough small things to fit in a sock that aren't too expensive but there will still be something to look forward to because of the one non food item. We also want one of those food items to be a lifesaver book since we both received one each year growing up.

After we were done with all our stuff we went to my parents and opened presents there. We got a 4 inch memory foam mattress topper that I am so excited for! But one of my favorite presents was a book of all my school work from elementary that my mom put together. It was so fun to read some of the funny things I wrote and look at my beautiful drawings.

When we were done there, we headed to Brody's mom's house where we had breakfast, opened presents and watched a comedy show of Jerry Sienfeld. Varsi gave me a puzzle (she picked up on me talking about wanting to do one- too bad that trait wasn't passed along to Brody! Although he did do a lot better this year) along with this awesome portable device that makes it so you can easliy move the puzzle around. I started working on it during the show!

Our next stop was to visit Brody's dad. We played on his new golf putting toy but couldn't stay for very long since we were wanted at my grandma's house as well. When we got there, we had leftovers and opened even more presents! After that, we went back up to my parents to play some games for a few hours and then headed back to Brody's mom's to hang out.

As you can tell, we had a pretty hectic day, hence the "mostly" in the title. It was great to see everyone and I love hanging out with both of our families, but we just didn't plan it out very well this year and the day ended up almost being more frusterating than fun. (The immense amount of snow sure didn't help much with the driving all around). So we've decided that next year, we're just going to see one family in the morning (who evers turn it is) and stay till 3 or so, then go to the next family and stay the rest of the day. Hopefully this will make Christmas even better for us. Anyway, despite the hectic driving around and worrying about whether or not we were spending enough time with everyone, it was still a fun day and I really do love Christmas!