Christmas Eve  

Christmas was a welcome break this year. It can be a little stressful, but with everything we had going on, it was nice to step back and just relax with family, eat great food, and share our love with gifts. This year we spent Christmas with my family. But we decided to open our family gifts before heading out. We didn't want to make anyone wait on us so we had to wake Josh up from his nap to open presents. Santa came to our house early, so we pretty much got to have Christmas twice.

My family's Christmas Eve tradition is to have a huge meal of every kind of mexican food you could dream of. We have tamales, tacos, red and green enchiladas, spanish rice, refried beans, tortillas, salsa, guacamole, etc. It is always SOOOO yummy! For the last few years my cousin April has joined our family for our holiday celebrations. We love having her there with us and I know it really makes the holiday for my dad.

After dinner, we all load into the car (now we have to take two) and go out to look at Christmas lights around town. This year there were some really fun houses. One house even had a Santa passing out candy canes to cars as they came by to see their home. It was a lot of fun.

Then we head back and have Christmas pudding. My mom makes it every year. It is layered with green and white pudding with red sprinkles in the middle. But the real fun is that in one of the cups there is a whole almond hidden. Whoever gets the nut, gets to open one of their presents that night. Now that we are getting a little older, my mom gets a gift specifically for the person who gets the nut. This year, I GOT THE NUT!!!! Woo Hoo!!! I got a special massage pillow. It was awesome! Then we all snuggle and watch the Christmas Letter which we have named Letter Day. It's an old movie but we love it. Especially me. Sadly this year things ran too late and we had to skip the movie. Little ones change things and it was already nearly 11:00 when we finally wound down so it was well past his bedtime. But we'll watch it next year.

Somehow we failed to take pictures during dinner, lights, and pudding but my mom got some so I will have to get them from her and post those later. Here are a few pics from our little families Christmas.

Our tree after Santa came (he visited our house early this year). It's sad, I know. There two decorations that are on there my little sister made for us. We just didn't have the energy or time to decorate the tree to be taken down again in just a few days. I figured that Josh didn't really know the difference and it helped keep him out of trouble.

The jumbo legos were by far Josh's favorite gift, from us and Santa anyway. It's great because Cody loves them too so the boys have a lot of fun together with these.

I had one of these when I was little and I spotted it at the store one day and decided to let Josh give it a try. I wanted to see if he liked it before I bought it. Well it was a bad idea because he LOVED it and threw a huge tantrum in the store when I put it back. He had never done that before and hasn't since. So I asked Santa if he said he was sorry for being naughty if he would bring it to Josh. Guess he really felt bad for being naughty in the store. :)

Jammies from Grandma and Grandpa Smith. They are rockets and super adorable!! And so soft. He really likes them.

This was Cody's "big" gift. I had to be pretty deceiving to keep it a secret. I guess it was worth it because he was pretty surprised when he opened his new Wii! It's been a fun way to spend time together and we do more exercise by laughing than by doing exercises or playing the games. I hope you liked it Code!!!

This is Josh's "wow" face. He was really excited by something and Cody caught it in a picture. I just love how expressive he is at this age. It was a lot of fun seeing that at Christmas.

Cody was super, SUPER sneaky this year. He got very creative in his wrapping and totally threw me off which was great! I like being surprised. I can't help but try to figure it out. It's just who I am, but I really don't want to know. REALLY!! So he did great and had me very surprised and happy this year. Here I am opening one of my three cricut cartridges he got me. Good job honey!