Christmas & New Years--December 2012

Christmas eve we continued with our tradition of having build-your-own pizzas for dinner.  The kids love this because they can put how ever much and whatever they want on their pizzas.  It is fun to see what everyone does.  Of course, we had Italian sodas with our pizzas!  Yum!

The finished products.  Mmmm, they look yummy!

Dinner was followed by the opening of new Christmas jammies.  The older chose not to get new pj's (party poopers;) ).  This was then followed by the reading of the Christmas story.

The night was finished off with the kids in bed and dad setting the "santa trap", actually it is a trap to keep Chase, Trey, and Layton from going upstairs before everyone is awake in the morning and seeing all the loot!

Christmas morning was a tornado of wrapping paper, boxes, smiles, and fun!  After opening presents we had our traditional mountain man breakfast and then the day was spent snacking, playing with the fun new toys, and enjoying each other's company.  I wish I would have taken more pictures that day. :(

Trey "snow face"

New Year's Eve Fun!

Happy New Year!  Welcome 2013!!

CHRISTmas 2011!

Christmas eve day was spent getting last minute things done around the house.  For dinner we followed our tradition of having build-your-own pizzas and italian sodas.  The boys love this, as do I because of the simplicity of it.

 

After dinner the boys got to open up their christmas pjs, Chase got a santa hat because he didn't want pjs.  Then we read the story of Christ's birth from the bible wearing our socks from Grandma Yearsley.

 Before heading to bed the boys got to pull all of the gifts out of dad & mom's room and put them under the tree.  Last year we started another new tradition of not putting the presents under the tree until Christmas Eve. We feel that it helps us to keep the focus off of the presents and more on the true meaing of Christmas--our Savior.

The older boys were so excited to see what kind of "trap" dad would come up with to let us know when they were sneaking up the stairs to see if Santa had come.  It was a another good trap that scared them (as well as dad & mom) with a loud BANG as things went crashing to the floor!  We made a deal that the boys would let us sleep until 7:30 and then it was present time!  Everyone was so excited to see what fun stuff they would get.  We were blessed with many neat and fun gifts.  After opening gifts we had Mountain Man breakfast (yet another tradition) and then got ready to go to church.  We enjoyed a very nice sacrament meeting focused on the true meaining of Christmas.  I have to say that I really love when Christmas falls on Sunday.  It is the best way for us to focus on why we celebrate Christmas.  The rest of Christmas day was spent loungng in our pjs, playing games, snacking on goodies, and enjoying being with our family (we were enjoying it so much that unfortunately there weren't any pictures taken).  It was truly a wonderful Christmas and we were very blessed with so much.

 

Traditions

One of the fun things about the holidays are the different traditions that each family has. When we had our first Christmas in our own home we asked the boys what traditions they wanted to do for Christmas Eve....they chose "build your own pizzas" (each indivdual puts the toppings of their choice on their pizza) for dinner, which I love because it is so simple and low-key. We have since added in italian sodas for the drink.After dinner we opened up our Christmas pajamas and put on our socks from G & G Yearsley then read the Christmas story. We also had to read our scripture for our scripture countdown to Christmas. Then we watched a short Chrismtas movie, set goodies out for Santa, and put the kids down for bed.

It was a nice, relaxing Christmas Eve full of tradition!