When everything gets a chance to settle down a little bit, we all come together again on my side of the family to celebrate Christmas together. It’s always the weekend after Christmas, on whatever day that falls on. We usually celebrated on the Sunday after Christmas, but this year we decided to try Saturday to give families Sunday to re-group before returning to work. I think it worked pretty well. Everyone came over to our house since we have the room to entertain (I can’t WAIT until the basement’s finished and we REALLY have lots of room!)
It’s Claire’s First Christmas so I had to get some good shots of my Goddaughter. *wink* She wanted all the presents so bad! She kept making a beeline for them.
The kids love their Uncle Brent so much! He’s a bit of a jungle gym for them at times too.
Tristan, Claire, Alexis & Noah (above)
Claire got the hang of opening presents quickly but she really LOVES the tissue paper! The hard part was keeping it out of her mouth.
Just what she wanted!!! A princess castle from Busha & Dzia Dzia. Auntie Peepers got Noah a cool car rug and Busha & Dzia Dzia got him a new wooden train set. All were hits with the munchkins!
We draw names in my family too and I drew Brent. He wanted shoes. I swear he has more shoes than I do. I found a great deal on a pair of Nikes in the Cities and got him these ones – and he liked them!!! Whew!
There just happened to be one more gift that was for the kids. It didn’t say who it was from but we figured it out when they opened it! Several years back, Brent wrapped a “light” gift in a box with a used rotor from his old Saturn. Ever since then, it’s been passed around to weight gifts. Carissa had it last and wanted to get rid of it so she passed it on to the kids. When you receive it, “You have been rotor’d.”
We also play a “white elephant” gift game with my family but we mix it up from year to year. One year we had to bring things to “re-gift”, other years it was just a $10 non-gender-specific item. We also have rules in our main gift exchange that you can’t give gift cards. So this year, that was the game theme: Try to be the most clever in wrapping a gift card.
Ryan won with his gift card on ice. We were wondering why it had to be left in the garage until we played!
There was also a Jimmy Johns GC wrapped in a JJ sandwich bread, Starbucks & Carribou Coffee GCs in their respective paper cups and then Dad picked his gift card bag and opened it to find a grey sweater dress. Don’t think that’s going to fit him! It was actually a gift for Alexis that got overlooked and didn’t have a name on it. LOL
So, did you lose count? How many celebrations was that? Seven. (We actually exchanged gifts with my dad at Grandma Knaeble’s birthday party the week before Christmas.)
In years past, we’ve been asked why we do all the running around and told that we should just celebrate with our family. But those are the years that feel like they’re lacking family. We are very fortunate when the weather cooperates and work allows us to travel to the Cities. This year we saw EVERYBODY! And with as many sets of extended families as we have, that’s a LOT of people! We may not get to do it every year, but those years that we do are extra special to us!
Thank you for making our holidays so merry! We love you all so much!
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