Monday, December 26, 2011

Christmas 2011

Christmas is our favorite time of the year!
We try to pack a ton of things in the short time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
There was decorating. Grace had her very own tree this year that she got to decorate all by herself while we put up the big tree. Dustin spent a day putting lights on the house. Sometime between the time he started hanging them and the time he finished several areas went out so he had to put up new lights. We made butter crunch. Grace got to help for the first time! I have my Grandma's recipe memorized and I plan to pass it down to my girls. We drove around looking at Christmas lights. We visited Santa. The girls are not fond of him this year. Olivia did not like him at all. Grace said she couldn't sit in his lap because she didn't know him that well and you shouldn't sit in someones lap you don't know. But we did make cookies for Santa.


Grace got to make them herself!

And Olivia got to try one!

Last year we decided to open our gifts on Christmas Eve. It spaces things out a little and lets us have more time to enjoy Christmas.
The girls were being silly for the camera :)

They were very excited to open all of their presents. This year I tried to teach Grace about giving. I let her "earn" money by doing little chores (helping with dinner, laundry, picking up toys, or helping with her sister). She is good about doing these things when asked but I thought letting her earn money and then using it to buy gifts for people would be a good learning opportunity. She even gave one of her dollars to the bell ringer so a little girl or boy would be able to have a new toy for Christmas! She got Olivia a baby doll (that can go in the bathtub!) and a remote control 4-wheeler for her Daddy.




After opening their presents and playing for a while, we changed into pj's. We made sure to set out cookies for Santa!

Olivia helped herself to one of Santa's cookies.


We let Grace stay up after Olivia went to bed to watch a Christmas movie with hot chocolate and popcorn. I think this is going to become a family tradition!

And then Santa came!
Grace was so excited for Santa to come that she wanted to go to bed around 4:30 on Christmas Eve. We were tracking Santa and when he got to Canada we ran to bed so we would be asleep before he got to our house.

This is what our tree looked like on Christmas morning!

We were all very excited about the new toys!!!!


The girls loved opening their stockings. Grace told everyone that Santa brought her a dollhouse and soap (bubble bath).


And we had to see if Santa ate his cookies and drank the milk we left out.
He left some crumbs!!

Hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!!!

1 comment:

Kaup Fleet said...

Maggie could hardly believe how big Grace has gotten! Merry Christmas...a little late.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin