Christmas Eve

The weekend before Christmas we were lucky to have Grandma and Grandpa Jensen come for a little visit. We showed them most everything around town, Dad's classroom, saw the Christmas lights and enjoyed time with them. I once again managed not to take any pictures of any of the fun...mostly we were just to busy having fun to be bothered by the camera (it was the theme of December this year in case you can't tell from all the posts with lacking pictures).

Christmas Eve was a great day for our little family. This is the first year we've stayed home for Christmas since Brian and I were married and it was so nice to have a quiet day with just our family (not that we don't love our extended families....because we do....just saying it's nice to have a low key one sometimes too).

We had a finished some last minute present things in the morning and the boys entertained themselves with toys and movies while Mommy worked in the kitchen. We enjoyed a super yummy Ham and Potato dinner complete with all the fixings of course.

After dinner, we opened the unexciting present of pajama's before taking showers (had to get ready for church the next day) and then once everyone was ready for bed we all read the Christmas story together from the scriptures. The boys used the amazing hand puppets my mom made them a few years ago to help tell the story as Dad read it from the scriptures (again no pictures to document this part).

Next we did a new tradition for our little family that we plan to do every year now. Clark had been bugging us about not having a star on our tree and though Mom is really not big on the idea of a decorative star on the tree, I agreed we could make one as a family and put it up Christmas Eve after we read the Christmas story.

Here is Clark proudly displaying the star we made:

 And Logan taking a turn as the model:

 Then Logan passed it to Clark

 Clark climbed up to hand it to Dad:

 And Dad placed it on top of the tree:

It was a lot of fun to make our little star and add it to the tree that night after talking with the boys about how the star appeared and the wise men followed it. It will be a fun tradition to make a new star each year as a family and then add it to our tree Christmas Eve.

Once the most important things we done that night, we gave in and let the boys open one present each from Grandma and Grandpa Jensen.

 They were a little excited and had a great time playing with their toys for about a half hours before the mean parents declared it was time to get ready for bed. Before we could climb in bed we did take care of leaving snacks for Santa and the reindeer and then had to put Clark's reindeer food on the lawn.

The reindeer food Clark's class made was oats and glitter we mixed together in a bag and it came with a poem that said you had to put it on your lawn Christmas Eve because the reindeer can see the glitter and smell the oats and it will help them find your house.

So here is Clark ready to put the food out:

 Both boys sprinkling it in the grass:

 Sprinkles soon became throwing handfuls:

 And then turned to dumping the bag since it was cold and we wanted to get it out and get back in the house. Here is the finished food drop if you can see it (the glitter shows up more then the oats):

Once that was done we all climbed in bed with dreams of Santa definitely dancing in our heads! :)

(Or at least the boys did....the parents might have been up a little later, but we climbed in bed eventually as well.)