Christmas Day 2015

 

On Christmas Day…we all slept in!  Even the boys. Susannah said she got up at 7:30 and no one else was awake.  After a yummy Christmas breakfast (above), we fed the animals, did dishes, and were ready to open presents by 11:30 🙂

 

One of my favorite Christmas memories is laying in bed trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve, and hearing Daddy and Mommy downstairs by the stairway, rustling through sacks to fill our stockings 😉  Now in addition to our parents filling them, we fill each others’.

Mine is the huge one at the top of the steps…because the hospital put me in one after I was born on Christmas Eve.  Leah’s is the white one right next to it.  When we were little, I always thought Leah got more things in her stocking, because hers would be overflowing, and you couldn’t see anything out of the top of mine, lol!  It didn’t occur to me that it was because my stocking was big enough to put a baby in it!

 

Handing out presents (Susannah is rattling hers to see if she can guess what’s in it!)

 

 

Selfie!

 

Noah made Daddy this little wooden airplane without a pattern or a kit!   My brothers are incredibly amazing with their building skills 🙂

 

Charissa…super happy that she got the ‘toboggan hat’ that she’s been wanting 😀

 

 

We take almost all day to open presents, because we come up with as many convoluted ways as we possibly can to decide who opens their gift next.  We all open them one at a time, too, because we want to see what everyone is getting, and what their reaction is 😀  Once we did oldest to youngest.  Then youngest to oldest.  Then our names in alphabetical order.  Then our favorite colors in alphabetical order.  Then Daddy picked someone to start, then they picked the next person, until everyone was picked 🙂

 

Noah and Isaiah were SO happy to get a new drill 😀

Figuring out their new tool…

Noah was equally excited to get his own (orange) toboggan hat.

 

 

Anna, super excited over her present (which I think were new earbuds) 😀

Funny faces…

 

Susannah, with a new wallet made by Leah

Susannah and Cassia both love learning about anything medical.  Susannah asked for a coloring book on the anatomy of the body, so now she gets to color muscles, and eyeballs, and blood vessels, and who-knows-what-all-else.  You can tell that Noah just does not ‘get it’ why Susannah is so excited about her gift 😀  Not his kind of coloring book!

More funny faces…not sure what about!

 

 

Anna really wanted an essential oils diffuser for Christmas, so several of us went together to get it for her.  Cassia is helpfully looking up the directions for Anna 🙂

Leah excited about her gift (only I don’t remember what it is!)

You may notice a pattern here…Charissa is really into pink camo.  She has pink camo shoes, and a pink camo hat, a pink camo jacket, and now a pink camo comforter…she was SO happy!

Waiting for our turn…no wait…it must be my turn, because I’m tearing into that paper 😀

Susannah with a new planner she got this year.  She and I LOVE planners, notebooks, pens, papers, sticky notes and all of that ‘office-y stuff’ 😀  She was super excited about her new planner.

A funny, random picture.

Isaiah surprised me with a little wooden airplane that HE made (without a pattern or a kit)!  The main body of the airplane (the fuselage), is made from several individually cut pieces of wood.  He cut every single one of them. And sanded them down.  And glued them together.  At this rate, he’ll be able to build me a real airplane by the time he’s sixteen, lol!

 

The boys’ last present involved a treasure hunt…Mommy is helping them out with one of the clues here.

The hunt took them all over the house, and finally outside to the shop…

 

Isaiah’s face is hilarious.  In the anvil was the clue, along with the key to our storage closet where their gifts were.  Noah is getting the clue out of the anvil, and Isaiah has the key, with a look on his face like, “Why is this here?!”

 

They were getting really excited (once they figured out what the key was for!), and Noah was telling Isaiah, “Hurry, hurry!”

 

THIS is what was in the storage closet!  They are oh-so-happy to have these new bikes!  They’ve been ‘fixing’ theirs off an on throughout the summer, borrowing pieces from other old bikes that we have, lol!  Did I tell you my brothers are amazing?  It’s rather cute to see them be ‘little men’ and build and fix things.  We didn’t see the boys for a while after they found their bikes…they rode them around for quite a while 🙂

 

This was kind of a “two-for-one” deal…because Mommy didn’t know that Daddy had bought her a bookshelf, assembled it, and set it up in the shop where she would see it when the boys were on their treasure hunt 😀  Mommy loves books, and therefore has more books than she has bookshelves.  Something she has passed on to several of her daughters 🙂

 

Mommy after she saw the bookshelf 🙂

 

At about 5:30, we were completely done opening gifts and going on treasure hunts 🙂  We cleaned up all of the trash and got all of the food out of the oven and had a huge feast of ham, sweet potato casserole, apple marshmallow salad, rolls, green beans, and “gourmet potatoes” (potatoes with sour cream and butter and all kinds of goodness!).

 

 

Several years ago we girls got tired of cooking all afternoon on Christmas Day, so now we have it down to a science to where all we have to do is put casseroles in the oven, and maybe throw together a salad.  It is also very helpful that there are seven of us.  Everybody picks two or three things to make, we make the casseroles the day before, and it’s DONE! 🙂

 

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a picture of it all done…we were so hungry, we just ate it! 😀

 

To finish off an amazing Christmas, we watched a family favorite…The Muppets Christmas Carol 🙂   Okay, it’s almost a family favorite.  Some of the girls don’t like it, lol!

 

“It’s in the singing of a street corner choir…it’s going home and getting warm by the fire…it is wherever you find love, it feels like Chriiissttmmaaasss!” 

 

Anna got a picture of the Christmas moon.  The boys informed me that I would be 59 the next time we had a full moon on Christmas.  This was comforting news, haha!

 

And that was the end of Christmas Twenty-Fifteen 🙂

 

 

Susannah and Cassia have been working up the Piano Guys arrangement of O Come, O Come Emmanuel for this Christmas season, and so Anna went with the two of them yesterday to a local chapel to record it for you…enjoy (and be sure to watch to the end)!!! 😀

Merry Christmas from all of us!!!

 

 

 

 

 

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