Christmas morning began bright and early. Cordelia woke me up between 6:30 and 7:00, a little later than her usual wake-up call. I couldn't let her go downstairs by herself, so we had to wake up the other children. Kyle and Kinneret didn't mind once they were reminded what day it was. The mini-trampoline and the castle caught their eyes first. We had to point them in the direction of the stockings.
We open stockings first at our house. Everyone gets chocolate. Santa also brought each child an accessory to the castle. (Kit got the court jester in his stocking.)
The girls are arranging everybody's castle figures in Cordelia's castle.
Usually after we open the stockings, we stop and have breakfast before opening the presents. Kyle and Kinneret dove right into the presents, instead. Notice the look on their faces when we suggested that we should have breakfast.
Kyle modeling his Iron Man sweatshirt and his Hulk mask. He wasn't too disappointed that Santa couldn't find didn't bring him the the Hulk smashing hands.
The girls modeling their dress-up clothes. Cordelia wore each of her (and Kinneret's) outfits several different times during the day.
Kit with his guitar and showing off his Stargate hat. Jay was able to order a cap with the symbol that is engraved on T'ealc's forehead.
We did eventually eat breakfast - Pillsbury orange cinnamon rolls (for me), monkey bread (for everybody else) and hot chocolate. We had tried to start a tradition of beignets for our Christmas morning breakfast, but decided that after all the pre-Christmas preparation issues we needed something quick and easy. I'm sure we ate lunch at some point during the day, but maybe not. For dinner, we again broke with tradition. When Kit was four or five, we read A Christmas Carol a little each night leading up to Christmas. We finished it on Christmas Eve and to keep in the spirit of the story, we made our version of an English Christmas dinner - roast beef (like we could afford to try crown roast!), vegetable yorkshire pudding, parsley new potatos, rolls, and ribbon jello salad. That became our traditional Christmas Eve dinner. Turkey was our Christmas Day dinner. This year, however, we couldn't handle two dinners that the children would refuse to eat. So we had pizza on Christmas Eve (just barely) and ate our traditional Christmas Eve dinner on Christmas Day. Last year we also added shrimp cocktail since that was something that my family always had on Christmas. We invited the missionaries to share dinner with us, thinking that two young adult men would make up for any lack of enthusiasm shown by the children. Alas, these missionaries didn't have quite the appetite we hoped for. We had lots of leftovers.
To round out our Christmas festivities, we made it to the Zoolight Safari on December 30th, the last day it was open. We sprung for the train ride and found that we could actually see more of the lights that way.
After the train ride, we wandered over to the barnyard. All of the kids had to get a picture in front of the angel wings. As if that would convince anybody.
Finally, we enjoyed a few minutes of the synchronized light show. Light trees were set up in the fountain area that were synchronized to music. Kit sat down when he heard TSO blaring over the loudspeakers. Kyle and Kinneret enjoyed the show for a while, but Cordelia was mesmerized and couldn't help but shake her booty. The video clip looks staged, but she had actually been dancing for several minutes before I thought to capture it. She was ready to take a break, but when she saw I was filming it she ran back to dance some more.
Since Kit went to a youth dance on New Year's Eve and the rest of us had a very quiet evening at home, this wraps up 2008! Happy New Year!
No comments:
Post a Comment