It Was The Week Before Christmas

And all through this house….there was always someone stirring.  Thank heavens we never saw a mouse.

This Christmas was one of my favorites of all time.  It was so nice to not have to worry about travelling anywhere.  This year Steven and Alicia brought their family out to see us.  So between having them here for 10 days and having a lot of my family living here, there was always something fun going on.  Steven and the kids had to go out and enjoy the snow.  We love living somewhere snowy…at least so far.

My family got together for a pre Christmas party with Jake and Emily before they headed to California for Christmas.  For several years my family has done an ornament exchange in the place of gifts.  I love it.  It is so much less stressful.  So, we thought it would be appropriate this year to give everyone this ornament.  I can’t believe we haven’t done a BYU ornament before.  And to make our ornament even more awesome…we gave gave it to everyone on the day BYU won their bowl game.

 While everyone was staying with us, I cooked more than I usually do.  It was pretty nice to have a hot meal every night.  It made me want to be more organized and to cook more often.  I’ll start that next week though.  I don’t think anyone enjoyed the spaghetti more than Ian did.  Well, maybe I should say none of us wore as much of the spaghetti as he did.

Christmas Eve came around and everyone came over for dinner at our house.  All the kiddos had tons of fun playing together.  And we had fun playing with them.  They all got to sport their cool new jammies.

  

And of course, we had to track Santa’s location.  The closer he got to Idaho, the more some of the kids were ready for bed…so Santa could come.

But, we couldn’t go to bed before sprinkling reindeer food down our front walk.  We had to entice the reindeer (with dried oatmeal and sprinkles) to stop at our house.

And boy did Santa find our house.  We must have been very good this year….or we really had him fooled.  But, I’ll save all that fun for another post.