It is a month-long festival, and when you cram all of that yuletide into the one week that your college kids are home, it becomes a week of dashing through the snow from mall to family party to classy Christmas event and back to the mall, at high speed and dragging along as many brothers and sisters as possible. Also, food.
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| This is us at the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Indianapolis. We watched the Nutcracker Ballet! Which is basically the music of my childhood, so I was in heaven the whole time. And Stephen liked it too. |
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| We had a Christmas gift exchange for the kids on Christmas Eve. Stephen gave to Michael and Logan, and he told them he had gotten them a Hershey's bar. It was actually a rocket....that he ended up assembling on Christmas. |
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| Then we got our Christmas jammies!! And Stephen ruined some pictures. And so did Brandon. |
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| The whole family got Christmas jammies! I love this tradition! |
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| My favorite decoration in the house was this ginormous ball of mistletoe. It is a very popular hangout with the newlywed couple and the engaged couple, and also the married-with-seven-kids couple. |
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| The girls and their Christmas jammies :) |
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| We like each other. |
This is another tradition that they do - every year, someone hides the pickle ornament somewhere on the Christmas tree, while everyone else waits in a different room. Then the person who finds it gets a Christmas book that they read to the whole family, and they are the one who hides the pickle the next year.
...GUESS who found the pickle this year??
Well it was me :) I promise they didn't just let me win, either. I know because there were tears.
Then I read "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" in my best teacher voice and it was on to the next tradition of making gingerbread houses!
This was not a "let's build our gingerbread houses and whoever has the most fun is the winner" kind of contest. Teams were picked out 2 weeks ago. Barricades were put up between competition sites so other teams couldn't look. And we were given a time limit of 18 minutes.
So it got a little intense and some feelings got a little hurt, but in the end, three works of art sat on the table, ready to be judged.
At some point in the middle of the night (or at 6:45 in them morning), Santa came and filled up the living room with gifts!
So that's how Christmas began up in here. More pictures to come of the rest of our break :)
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