Christmas Eve!

As I mentioned before, we woke up in Blackfoot on Christmas Eve.  We had a yummy breakfast with Matt & Sara and family, Cindy & DJ and family, and my folks.  We all rushed out the door after breakfast to head to our various homes/destinations.

We got home and went to the grocery store to fulfill our hair brained idea for neighbor gifts.  It was totally last minute, took forever, we missed a ton of our neighbors, etc, but it was really fun and I think we might have a tradition on our hands.  We will certainly plan it out much better in the coming years, but it was a blast.
We made over 100 spring rolls with Thai peanut sauce and took them around to neighbors.  We have always wanted to find something that wasn't more sugar (which we totally love, but don't do anything spectacularly unique with at our house) and that would be fun and different.  Stanton's sister Julie brought these to our family party and we all devoured them, so we decided to give them a go.  They were a lot of fun to make.  Once you get everything chopped up and laid out, they go fairly quickly.  The kids LOVED delivering them to our friends.  There's something so special about giving and the kids caught that spirit doing this.

Those are the rolls on the top left - stacked in the background are many of the plates we delivered.

While Stanton and I made the spring rolls, Chloe was busy making orange rolls for our Christmas dinner.  We ate them with ham and they were delicious.  She honestly did all the work herself (and let Cannon make snakes from the dough that she then tied in knots).  She rolled them, knotted them, placed them in the pan, zested the orange, sprinkled the sugar...everything.  I put them in the oven and pulled them out.  It was so cool to have her take on such a big project!

Continuing with the food pictures - the top right it our dinner table on Christmas day.  I decided to cook a big turkey dinner.  Yikes.  It was a ton of work for just our little family, but it was fun to have a nice dinner together.

Bottom right - since I completely ruined a batch of caramels and two batches of fudge, I had to take a picture of the beautiful lemon-pistachio wreaths I did have success making.  They were awesomely delicious and so pretty. 

 After our orange roll and ham dinner on Christmas Eve, we opened jammies, had showers, read my favorite Christmas book - Christmas Day in the Morning by Pearl S. Buck

and did the Nativity.  Stanton had had enough of my Nativity costume box being pulled out and scattered by Christmas Eve, so we stuck with puppets.  I think we had Chloe be Mary.  :)

Right as we were finishing the Nativity, our friend Shirlene Shaw came over.  She brought fun little gifts for the kids (Nerf guns for the boys and an awesome 20 questions game for the girls - it's incredible and addicting!).  She read them  'Twas The Night Before Christmas, which the kids totally loved.

After she read the book, we checked Santa's progress across the globe and then headed to the music room for ------  CAROLING!!!!  Have I mentioned that Shirlene is an amazing pianist???  She's the girls' wonderful piano teacher.  I have always wanted to sit around the piano and sing carols on Christmas Eve.  It was so fun to do it with her!  We sang hymns and fun carols and everything in between.  That bottom right picture is the boys shouting out "in a one horse open sleigh, HEY!"  Oh, how totally fun this was.  It was the perfect way to end our Christmas Eve.  

The kids got to bed happily and we said goodbye to Shirlene.  A perfect night.  Casual and fun.