Thanksgiving
Spent the morning making breakfast in our driveway for about 200 of our closest friends. We host a pancake breakfast for our neighbors on Thanksgiving morning. This was our 6th year! It's a great time to come together and give thanks for living in such a fantastic neighborhood. We were worried about the rain so we set up massive amounts of tarps but it stopped raining about 5 minutes before the breakfast was about to start. We were so grateful!
Later that day we went to my parents' house for Thanksgiving dinner. Olives on all 10fingers is a tradition not to be forgotten!
E. and Cousin T. had way too much fun eating at thier own kids' table.
Their fun continued with cards and beer (root beer, that is)!
And even more fun with cross-dressing!!
Fast forward to December. Every year the G Family hosts a gingerbread party for our street. (Did I mention that we live in a fantastic neighborhood?) The kids get the chance to turn a milk carton into a gingerbread house..a feast for the eyes as well as their little tummies! Christmas Eve baking day! 
Christmas Eve baking day! We made three kinds of cookies, banana bread, deviled eggs, pasta salad, and a cheeseball.
We spent Christmas Eve at our house. Lots of family joined us for dinner and a nativity program put on by the cousins. A. was in charge of the program and did a good job making phone calls to gather costumes, assigning parts and running a rehersal. No matter how simple, these little programs always bring in the true spirit of Christmas.
After a few games of ping pong the cousins went home and our little family continued with our own tradition of opening new pajamas and watching The Polar Express before going to bed.
Christmas morning began around 6:30, fairly late for us, hooray! Always a wonderful and memorable time. I wish it could last longer. It is always disappointing to me when weeks of planning and shopping and wrapping are history in less than 30 minutues! I was stressed this year in deciding what to get my kids for Christmas. They really didn't NEED much this year and I was trying to cut back and didn't want to buy things just for the sake of buying things. Once I did decided on what to buy I got it all out to wrap and looked at it all together and decided that it was too much. Have you ever watched your kids unwrap on Christmas morning and realized that you may have overdone it? I didn't want that to happen this year. So a couple of days before Chritmas I took some of the gifts back to the store. (Sorry kids, if you're reading this! Don't bother to ask me what those things were...you'll never get it out of me! And I've shredded the receipts!) So I was a little stressed about the older ones in particular beng disappointed about not getting as much this year. And guess what...they weren't. They were just as excited about what they DID get. It was a great lesson for me as a parent to take my expectations out of it and just enjoy the holiday.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
2 comments:
The holidays are always so wild and crazy and then, like you said, Whoosh- they're gone. Glad you guys enjoyed yours so much.
Hey- tell Trevor that my brother, Scott, is starting PA school in June. It's the one on the Mesa/Gilbert border but the name is escaping me right now.
I want to come live in your neighborhood. Sounds like loads of fun.
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