It’s the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year!

Perhaps that was last month…but we were so busy then, we didn’t have time to blog!

 

This post is primarily about Christmas Day, but a few more fun things we did in December were:

 

1. Operation Christmas Child.  It’s so much fun filling ‘shoeboxes’ with all kinds of fun and useful things and then sending it off to someone across the world who will hear about (and see!) the love of Jesus.  Even the boys get in on it and love it 🙂

 

2. We had Grandpa Jerry and Grandma Zelda over 🙂  You probably remember Susannah and Cassia’s Washington D.C. trip, and how they adopted some new grandparents for us…so the rest of us got to meet our new grandparents, hehe!

 

We had SO much fun visiting together and getting to know our new grandma and grandpa 😀  It was sad when they had to leave!  They are both so sweet, lots of fun, and their love for Jesus just shines through.  We love them! We played some of our instruments for them, and sang, and got to hear more about the D.C. trip.  Now we can’t wait to see them again!

 

3. Santa came to our house in his fire truck 😉  We’ve posted about him before, but he comes every year and gives out small bags of candy.  Who cares about sleighs when there’s a real live fire truck with sirens and lights going, right in your driveway! 🙂

 

 

 

Quite possibly we are the oldest ‘kids’ in Mentone who still get excited about Santa coming 😀  It’s tradition!

 

4. Susannah, Leah, and I (Jessica) went to see the “Messiah” live for the very first time this past December!  Ohhhhh!  It was absolutely delightful!

 

 

5. Christmas dinner!  We always split up the Christmas menu between all of us girls so that we don’t have much to cook. Then we get as much as we possibly can all done before Christmas.  On Christmas Day all we have to do is pull casseroles out of the fridge and slide them into the oven, and then pull out pies, salads, and all the ‘cold’ stuff 🙂   It also makes for less dishes on Christmas Day…which we are exceedingly happy for!

 

More Christmas Dinner preparations…

 

Cassia & Bekah

 

Kitchen craziness

 

 

 

6. Christmas morning!!! Having our favorite Christmas breakfast of egg casserole, orange juice, and cream cheese cinnamon rolls.

 

Charissa even decked Noel out for the day.  Not sure if Noel was so thrilled about it, but she sure was cute!

Noel is our new house cat.  Yes.  House. Cat.  Who would have thought we would have such a thing?!  We’ve had house dogs but not cats.  She’s supposed to be in the house temporarily, but we said that back in November…

But she’s adorable and we all love her 😀  Susannah got her from the post office.  She’s the third cat we’ve gotten from there.  If you don’t want a cat…stay away from the post office, lol!

 

Waiting to open presents together…

 

We took about forty-five minutes just opening stockings 😉  We like going one at a time and watching to see what each person got.

 

So many faces going on here…

 

Isaiah & Bekah

 

Noah & Charissa

 

goofy faces

 

Since I was born on Christmas Eve, the hospital gave me a ginormous stocking (and put me inside of it!).  Every year Daddy and Mommy took a picture of me standing in it, until eventually all of the pictures were the same…me trying to fit both feet inside of it while standing up.  Now I just check to make sure everything is out when I’m done opening it 😉  I love Anna’s face here.

 

 

Not sure what was so funny…but I love this picture.

 

Susannah, already writing in a new planner she got in her stocking.

 

Ever since Noah got a Nerf gun for his birthday, Isaiah has been wanting one…you can tell he’s pretty happy with this present!

 

I love these faces of surprise and delight!

 

 

 

Guess who else wanted a Nerf gun?!  We’ve had a few Nerf wars since.  Once Cassia was trying to read a book in the middle of a war, and she kept getting hit in the head.  “Not around civilians!  Go somewhere else!” she told them.

 

And the Nerf guns have lead to statuses like these:

Had to climb over the banister to get downstairs because my little brother just set up his couch cushion fort on the landing 🙂 #nerfwars

— Seven Sisters (@7Farmgirls) December 29, 2014

 

 

 

One of our favorite ‘tricks’ to throw someone off the track of what we got them is to get a huge box, load it up with school books, wood blocks, etc. and wrap it. Rebekah actually weighed her gift to Anna and it was 29 1/2 lbs 😀

 

Waiting for our turn…

 

Rebekah’s present to Anna didn’t arrive in time, so she gave her a piece of paper saying ‘Error 717: gift cannot be found but will arrive eventually’.

 

Susannah and Bekah had a ‘thing’ for destroying every bow that came on their present…that’s what she’s doing here…

 

Anna surprised me and got me a birthstone ring…something I really wanted.  THAT box weighed 28 1/2 lbs and the ring box was tucked in the corner beside all of Anna’s schoolbooks 😀

 

 Cassia, super happy about…whatever is in that box!

 

 

 

 

Charissa took the time to make Mommy a really, really neat scrapbook with all of our pictures in it 🙂  I think Mommy liked it 😉

 

Some of Leah’s amazing gift wrapping art.

 

Everybody intent on whatever Leah is opening…

 

I gave Cassia a birthstone ring, and she liked hers a lot, too 😉

 

Noah and Isaiah got new basketballs…Noah is smelling his, hehe!

 

Isaiah opening a gift from Charissa…

 

…a hand carved tiger!

 

This…is simply adorable!  Noah made a ‘Joy’ sign for Mommy.  And the J is backwards.  Oh he’s adorable!

 

More of Leah’s art…

 

 

 

Charissa made her guinea pig, Chloe, a couple of presents.  One of them was a tunnel.  Chloe loves it…she loves anything she can hide in!

 

 

Noah and Isaiah were opening identical presents, so Isaiah turned his head because he didn’t want to see Noah’s before he got his own opened 😀

 

Mommy and Daddy kept kissing…and some of the girls were hollering and teasing them about it.  So Mommy put up a towel that Daddy gave her so we wouldn’t have to watch 😀

 

Anna loved the ruffled journal cover that Susannah made her.  It was a true act of love from Susannah, because she doesn’t like ruffles, and she can’t stand loose threads, and these ruffles have raw edges 😀 😀

 

 

Probably THE highlight of Christmas for these two was getting their very own BB guns!  And let me tell you, they are good shots!

 

They’re already talking about when they’ll be big enough to go deer hunting with Daddy 😀

 

After all the gifts were opened, we had a ‘hugging party’…

 

 

…everyone was giving each other hugs saying, ‘Thank you!  Thank you!”

 

 Best Christmas Ever!!!

(until next year)

 

The aftermath…Isaiah just looked over my shoulder as I was typing this, saw the picture and said, “That is some serious junk!”

 

 

Next, it was time for Christmas dinner…ham, barbecue cranberry sauce, marshmallow apple salad, ‘yummy’ salad, two different kinds of sweet potato casseroles, ‘gourmet’ potatoes, stuffing, rolls, and green bean casserole.

 

 

 

The pretty table…

 

 

I had a lot of fun this year wrapping some gifts that made a lot of noise.  One was a catnip mouse for Noel that squeaked whenever you moved it.  The other one was a set of sleigh bells for our family orchestra.  We’ve talked and talked about getting them, so this year I decided to surprise everyone and get a set.  Here’s a little tiny snippet of one of the songs we play around Christmastime, Sleigh Ride for Strings.  It was our very first time practicing with them, but it still is pretty neat with the bells.

(Did I mention those bells are so fun?!  I wonder what the UPS man thought as he brought that jingling box up the sidewalk).

 

 

After I wrapped both of those noisy gifts, I rattled and squeaked them on my way downstairs to put them under the tree, and Leah kept trying to grab them and figure out who they were to 😀

We ALL had fun snooping this year…maybe more so than we usually do.  We didn’t snoop enough to find out what we were getting, because we didn’t want to do that, but we just had fun shaking, peeking, and looking to see which packages were ours 😀

I would start crawling around the tree, looking for gifts addressed to me.

A sister would come in. “Jessica!  What are you doing young lady?”

Me: “Oh, just checking the tree water!”

Sister: *starts crawling around the tree with me*

Another sister comes in: “What do you girls think you are doing?!”

And so it goes on.  Half the fun is getting caught doing it, hehe!

 

7. The last thing we did this year was go to jail!  Every year for the past three years we’ve gotten to sing and play our instruments for the inmates.  The first time we did it we were a bit nervous, since we’d never been to jail before 😉  but once you start singing for them, you see that they’re just regular people, too…like you.  And somehow they bless you while you’re trying to bless them 🙂

And we did get out of jail in time to come home and celebrate with our customary whistle-blowing, pan-banging, hollering and shouting at midnight to ring in the new year 😀

 

Stay tuned…pretty soon we’ll be putting up another post on when we got our Christmas tree 😉

 

Hey…it’s better late than never!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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