Christmas Eve

This year we got to have Elizabeth's family, Stephen's family, Mom and the twins here for Christmas (and Timmy, who we are lucky enough to get year-round). Mom and Stephen's family stayed at our house and Elizabeth and the twins stayed at Timmy's. It seemed to work out pretty well, other than Claudia almost freezing to death because Jon keeps our house so cool. 

Mostly we just enjoyed hanging out together, but we did try to get everyone outside when the weather was decent. Our Christmas Eve adventure was to Annie's Playground, where the kids had a great time playing a huge variation of hide and seek. 

Catherine wearing my sunglasses and looking like an incognito celeb.

Elise, Eowyn, and Tata (with some help from Joanna) on the monkey bars.

Then it was back to our house for some holiday movie watching!

Just kidding--they found Encanto on Disney+. 

Poor Elizabeth had a round of sick little girls, so she asked if we could do dinner and Nativity a bit earlier than usual so they could get back to Timmy's house and get everyone in bed. 

We had a much larger cast than usual, so we had to make up some additional roles. There were several little girls who all wanted to be Mary. Tata eventually won (well, Eowyn won the number guessing competition, but Tata cried the best and Eowyn relented). All the other potential Marys picked out beautiful princess dresses and became angels. 

I'm still not sure how it happened, but the shepherds all ended up with giant swords and axes as staffs and the wise men all had various Nerf guns to give to Baby Jesus. This led to two rather unfortunately hilarious events:

#1: Elijah got ahold of one of the guns and happily ran through the flock of sheep, shooting them all at point blank range with very vigorous sound effects.

#2: Catherine (a shepherd) ended up with a gun somehow and pulled the trigger since she thought it wasn't empty. PLOT TWIST: It was not empty. It had exactly one round of ammo, which happened to hit little Hannah (one of the princess/angel crew) right in the face. She burst into tears and Catherine was close to bursting into tears herself. The rest of us were crying for very different reasons. 

So not our most reverent production, but possibly the most memorable! 

After that my family headed upstairs to open Christmas pajamas and gifts from Grandma Cathy. I only had to threated Catherine several times and take 20 shots in order to get this shot:

Elijah's book from Grandma had a bulldozer in it.

Nothing in life matters more than bulldozers.

Not even Christmas Eve Star Wars pajama pictures.

Catherine in her adorable Baby Yoda onesie/jammies:

Claudia and I had a fun stocking-stuffing party in my bedroom after all the littles went to bed. Thank you Dollar Tree for having awesome things like unicorn and shark stockings. Santa may have brought Elijah an upgraded stocking for Christmas because, shark stockings:

Then it was off to bed so Santa could come!