Early Family Christmas - 2015

I realized that the only major holidays we celebrated on the right days this year were New Years and Halloween. (Seriously, we celebrated Easter in March before Brandon went to WOCS, we watched Independence Day Fireworks on July 2, and we celebrated Thanksgiving on Black Friday) So it should come as no surprise that we celebrated Christmas almost a week early.  

We moved Christmas up because my family will be in town over real Christmas and we all agreed it would be too crazy to try to have 6 different family units all trying to celebrate Christmas together.  So this way we were able to enjoy our own little family time and traditions before everyone arrived.  

The fun started with the last day of school.  Some genius decided that the last day of school for the year was the perfect day to have pajama day.  This was great!  Everyone was in great moods as we got ready for this last day.  I did make sure the kids were wearing clean pajamas to school, but I didn't worry about brushing their hair.  Derrick was funny.  Brandon put him into pajamas, but Derrick didn't understand what was going on.  So he found his real clothes and made sure we helped him change into those. 

The kids watched the Polar Express at school and they came home with little bells.  Derrick also came home with at least 5 different ornaments that his teachers had helped him make at school.  I still need to take a picture of them all, but it touched my heart to see so much stuff that he'd helped make.  He usually doesn't participate when we do crafts at home because my attention gets split between helping Charlotte and Lydia and making sure Veronica doesn't eat all the craft supplies. I'm so glad he's able to go to pre-school where the staff can help him do little projects. 

The kids came home and we all were so excited that school is out for the next three weeks. I'm sure that we'll all be over joyed to start school again in January, but for now it's great to be free.  

Charlotte made this cute little sled for her reindeer Antler.     

 Friday the 18th became our Christmas Eve.  Brandon still had class, but that was okay because it was his last day for a while. The kids and I spent the morning vacuuming the house (I told them that Santa checks all the rooms to make sure they are clean before he leaves new toys.)

Then we spent the afternoon cooking food for our Christmas Eve dinner.  Here's Lydia helping me roll out dough for crescent rolls.

Brandon came home for lunch and talked me through making kjottkaker which are little Norwegian meat cakes and are amazing.  He also helped peel potatoes for mashed potatoes.  Later he'd put together the rice crem.  But other than that I was running the show in the kitchen.  It was a lot of work, but I LOVE this food so it was all worth it.

I turned on old Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concerts on youtube and the kids watched those while I finished things up in the kitchen.  There was such a happy spirit in our home.

 We'd invited the Missionaries over to have dinner with us so there'd be an extra reason to make all the special food.  They joked that if tonight was Christmas Eve they should be allowed to call their families tomorrow.

 Here's my plate with my half eaten food.  (I was really excited to eat the kjottkaker.)  I'd given myself a free pass on what I could eat for the next 24 hours and I was taking advantage of it.

 As always the rice crem was a hit - at least with the adults.  The missionaries said it tasted like marshmallows.

 The missionaries helped us move some furniture around and then they shared a short Christmas message with us.  Then they left.  We plan to save the Christmas Eve Party stuff like dancing around the tree for real Christmas Eve when my family is here so we had to make up new traditions for this night.  Brandon read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to the kids.

We also gave everyone new pajamas.  Derrick got ones with the Hulk on them.  He took a minute to decide that he wanted to wear them, but then he wore them for like 36 hours straight.

 I read the kids the Night Before Christmas.

 Then, I kid you not, we sat around and sang Christmas Carols.  It sounds so impossible, but the kids played and Brandon and I sang together.  We all had a great time.  I'd kind of worried that we'd be trying to force Christmas by doing it early and that it would feel fake, but really this night felt just like Christmas Eve.

Usually the kids' bedtime is at 7:00 (it gets dark here at 4:30 right now so 7:00 feels like midnight), but we let them stay up until around 8:00.  Soon the girls were asking to go to bed.  So we hurried to put out milk and cookies.  Lydia had written Santa a note so we put that out too.

 We had another magic moment when all the kids lined up in front of the tree wearing their new pajamas.

 The kids all went to bed fairly easy, but Brandon and I waited about an hour or so before we started putting out the presents.  Mercifully, we'd already wrapped them all the night before.

 Here are the cradles all painted and ready to be played with.

I just have to say that I was really happy with what we could give our kids this year.  Sure a lot of the presents were from thrift stores and yard sales, but that was because our kids are rough with toys and I prefer to buy things that have some experience in them. Our economic situation has improved a lot over the past 6 years. I'm in awe every time Brandon get's paid these days.  He makes as much in a two week time period now as he made in a month back when the twins were born. (I think that says more about how little he was making back then rather than how much he is making now.)

This was the first year that we were able to provide all the kids' toys on our own.  (The past two years we were selected to participate in the Santa's Workshop at Fort Hood.) This was also the first year where I didn't stress out about money.  Other years I've had to figure out how we'll afford to pay all our bills and still have money left over for gifts.  This year my biggest concern was whether or not we should try to make a double student loan payment this month.  (I opted to skip it for this month so we could have some wiggle room.)  

 Not having to worry about as much about money led to some problems with the stockings.  Brandon and I had both bought things for the stockings - thinking that the other parent hadn't bought that much.  They ended up stuffed to the brim and very heavy.  We'll have communicate a little better about this next year.

 Brandon woke up early on Saturday so he could take care of signing out from work as soon as possible.  This was his first break since the beginning of August and he was super happy about being away from work for a while. He came back home and crawled into bed with me.  The kids gave us a gift by sleeping in until 7:30.  The we heard Derrick come out of his room followed by Veronica yelling from her crib, "Da-deeeeee, I want outttttt!"  Charlotte and Lydia were up soon after and soon everyone was checking out their gifts in the living room.

 I wont give you a run down of everyone's gifts, but everyone was really happy.  Probably one of the favorites was a little plush pig that I bought for 25 cents at a thrift store.  Charlotte loved it - possibly even more than the Rudolph that she' asked for and that I'd bought off of Amazon for $18.  (This is the other reason I buy as many second hand gifts as possible.)

After the presents were open the kids noticed their bulging stockings.  They were very happy by all the toys and candy inside.

 Derrick loves train crossing gates so I made sure to buy him one of those.  It was such a tiny little gift, but I knew that he'd spend hours opening and shutting the gate.  I was right.  He set it up with the rest of his tracks right away and played with it all day.

 Brandon bought  new toy helicopter and had fun flying that around.

 As you can see the living room became a mess.  But it was Christmas so none of us cared.

 The girls set up all the new little toy houses in a circle and played with them for a long time.

 For years I've told Brandon that I'd buy him a table saw for Christmas one year.  Well I didn't do that this year, but I did let him rent one.  He'd been looking forward to working on our new table all week so I had no issues letting him run off to Home Depot and then spending the day out in the garage.

 The kids played with toys all day, Brandon played with tools, and I sat on the couch and read Brandon Sandersons FireFight all day.  Best Christmas ever!

I also ran to the store to buy food for when my family will be here.  That's one of the nice things about celebrating on a non-holiday.  You can still get stuff done if you need to.

 This isn't a picture of the finished table, but you get the idea of what it's going to look like. It's going to be 8 feet long when it's fully extended, but Brandon's making it so it will have a leaf that comes out so it's "only" 6 feet long.

 We let the kids stay up as late as they wanted which turned out to be around 10:00. They helped us clean up the living room so it wouldn't be a pig stye on Sunday.  Lydia and Derrick ended up sleeping in the livingroom.

 Charlotte fell asleep on her floor.  (Sometimes I wonder why we bother with beds and bedrooms for these children.)

 And Veronica was in her bed, but then I made the mistake  of going in there for this picture.  I wanted to show her cuddling with the wooden train that I'd given her.  Instead she got up and didn't really go back to sleep until 12:00 and then was up again around 3:00.  She also demonstrated that she knew how to climb out of her bed.

 She ended up laying next to Lydia for a while.  I keep forgetting to mention this, but I feel like it's important - over Thanksgiving Veronica became the same age that Charlotte and Lydia were when we moved to Texas.  They seemed so young when we made that journey three years ago.  And now my baby is the same age.

Christmas is always a difficult time of year for me to warm up to.  I feel like a lot of the time I'm just annoyed by the whole thing, and I hold the good stuff at arms length. For most of my life I've noticed that I don't really like Christmas until its almost over.  Maybe that's why I like celebrating it early.  Because now I feel like Christmas has worked it's little magic and I'm excited for it.  And what's great is that it's not over yet.  There are still 5 more days to enjoy it - and I have my whole family coming to spend Christmas with me.