Christmas Eve

Since Matt and I were married we have always had a Christmas Eve tradition. We have always spent the evening with Matt's Sister's family.  We love that family, and count them as some of our bestest friends ever!  We always meet at dinner time, sometimes before if time allows, and have our Christmas Eve soup.  Then we pack all the kids up in the cars and go see Christmas lights, our favorite being the Spanish Fork Light festival.

This year, far away in Germany, we couldn't share our tradition of 14 years or more with our favorite Christmas Eve family.  So we did some things that we always wanted to do, but never seemed to have the time or the kitchen when we were traveling.

 It's Christmas time, our advent calendar says it is...

 The night before, at the ward Christmas party, all the kids got these giant chocolate Santa's from Santa Clause.  I guess we were too slow getting the boys their breakfast.  Shortly after waking up in the morning I found them in the kitchen like this.

 I have always wanted to decorate cookies for Santa and make homemade ginger bread houses with my kids.  Christmas eve always seemed so busy, so Santa usually ended up with store bought cookies, or old stale cookies we brought with us to Utah.

This year we made gingerbread boys and girls, snowmen and a gingerbread house.  It was so much fun.

 I love this face that Cora makes.  She always makes it when she concentrates.

 Trying to decorate a gingerbread boy with my boys.  They weren't much into it.  Hunter ate the candies, and Jack new they were balls...and everyone knows that balls must be thrown at all costs.  I am still finding little candy balls in odd places around the dinning room.

After decorating cookies, eating some Christmas Eve soup ( we made potato and ham chowder), we tried to find some Christmas lights.  We were out of luck.  There just isn't any huge massive light festivals here where we live.  No animals made out of lights, no dinosaurs...so we had to content our selves with driving down the main streets in a couple of towns.  The kids weren't very impressed, so we ended early and delivered the last of our Christmas goodies to friends and neighbors.  Then we opened our Christmas jammies and snuggled up in blankets, eating cookies and drinking cocoa while watching a Christmas movie.

It's not how we are used to spending Christmas eve, but it still turned out nice.

Merry Christmas everyone, we hope Santa comes too!