Merry Christmas!!

 

Christmas was great. We didn't put any presents under the tree before Christmas Eve because we were sure the dog would chew them up - so on Christmas morning the kids were amazed by all the presents. Jackson's first comment was "that is a lot more presents than we had last year!!" Of course that was because John and Kami brought a ton of presents for each other..... :) We opened the stockings and played with what was in those while we waited for everyone else to get up. It was fun to watch the kids open presents. They would say things like "Santa knew I wanted this and I didn't even tell him!" and "This is my favorite present ever!" Hailey was a little unsure of all the chaos so she sucked her thumb and opened presents with other hand. We had quiche for breakfast (Matt's family tradition) and ham for dinner. It's fun to try to figure out how to mix traditions. You realize you have expectations you didn't even know you had! We always had the big dinner Christmas Eve while Matt's family did it on Christmas day. They also never opened presents on Christmas Eve. We opened presents from everyone else but the immediate family - we did those Christmas morning. We also had presents in our stockings while Matt had candy, nuts and oranges. We are so rarely home at Christmas that we haven't had to figure any of this out. It will be fun to see what happens over the next few years as we stay home more often over the holidays