A Holly Jolly Christmas

This Christmas was the best (and worst) I've had in a long time.
It was the best because I got to be with my family and just share in the joy of the season.
It was the worst for reasons I don't want to go into. If you need to know, you already do.

Christmas was always the best growing up!
We would wake up super early,
Dump out our stockings,
Eat breakfast hours later when mom and dad woke up,
Hastily wash all the dishes,
The OPEN PRESENTS!

It's funny how as the years go on your priorities change.
Now, we always sleep until about eight.
We lazily look through our stockings.
We eat breakfast and throw away paper plates, cups, and plastic forks (we're all sick of dishes).
Then we sit down and delegate who gets to dig for presents.

Christmas is especially fun because we've got Gwen and Phoebe keeping us on our toes now.
If we're not careful, Gwen will rip all the paper off all our gifts! (It only happened once this year).
It sure is a treat seeing what we all thought to get for each other for our sibling gifts.
This year we bought for the person younger than us, so I got Maci.
I had this gift planned for months.

This is 1/4 of her gift. It's a set of salt and pepper shakers in the shape of peas.

The others were an old fashioned telephone,

A chick and egg shell,

and a pair of shoes. (All salt and pepper shakers)

I thought they were really cute.

This was my sibling gift, courtesy of Brendan.

Toy Story 3 and The Book of Awesome.

For those of you who don't know, 

the guy who wrote that book also writes a blog

called 1000 Awesome Things.

Check it out.

It is AWESOME!

I also got a couple of scarves,

And an illustrated book of Christmas carols (the same one I got for Kenna),

A digital picture frame,

7 Pounds (the movie...and unfortunately, the real thing too ;),

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation season 9,

A JC Penney gift card,

A Costa Vida gift card,

and Pure Seduction, possibly the best scent Victoria's Secret has ever invented.

Sometimes it's hard to remember the true meaning of Christmas, but it's my prayer that we all stopped for a minute to remember our Savior. Without Him, none of this would have ever happened!

Okay, one last memory.

There we were, sitting in church. Gwen was laying across my lap and had rested her head on Mom's lap. The second speaker got up and began her talk. She started with a story that contained the sentence, "There is no Santa Claus." Gwen said, "No Santa Claus?!" and sat bolt upright with a horrified look on her face. It was so cute!!!