Merry Merry Merry Christmas

The Christmas of 2008 is going down in my history book as one of my favorites. Having 2 girls ages 4 and 2 has made it all magical. Our girls made every aspect of the Christmas season exciting. One of my favorite things was their reaction to our overzealous Christmas light loving neighbor's yards. It almost made me want an inflatable snow globe on my own lawn =0)!

Christmas morning was simple, and exciting. Liv woke up first at 6:45, and came in to tell Brad and I it was Christmas. Gwen woke up shortly after and she and Liv played with their unwrapped gifts from Santa while Brad made us a scrumptious breakfast of eggs and bacon.

Then we took our time opening presents, playing with what we opened for a while and then moving on to the next.

The girls were the most excited about their Barbies that they got from Santa.

Christmas eve was a blast. We started out with an nice Christmas Eve dinner of the traditional Fish Chowder at Brad's parent's house. Liv helped Nana make bread, The top picture is of our families Ginger bread house in the ginger bread village. Liv did a lot of the designing herself. She is really into patterns lately (ever since she started preschool this fall) and she was pretty happy about the pattern in the roof edge. After dinner we went to our house for our annual Rand Family Follies. I love that Brad grew up having this same sort of tradition that my family always had. We had Brad's family over and our friends the Hymas' too. We had a great talent show/extravaganza, complete with magic tricks, funny faces, singing, kazooing, Reindeer games, word scrambles, a pipe bell chorus, a live nativity and YUMMY desserts. Brad and I made our own set of pipe chimes for our "talent" this year. Everyone participated as we sang Christmas carols and accompanied ourselves on the bells. Liv performed a great card trick and a disapearing trick, where she took a necklace, showed it to all of us, had us close our eyes, and when we opened them the necklace was out of sight.....pretty tricky! And Gwen performed her funny face for everyone.