Merry Christmas

Our tradition here is to have our immediate family Christmas celebration on the day closest to the 25th for which Trev is home for Breakfast :) That means, work days are out (he leaves around 7am) and Sundays traditionally are out unless we skip church(he often leads worship and needs to be at church early). We love the whole "get-up-early-to-open-presents-and-stay-in-your-PJs-all-morning-to-play" thing. We're not as particular about the day. So....today was Christmas at our house.
It started with the kids dancing around our beds yelling, "Wakee-wakee" as usual. Egan went to turn on the pre-set coffee pot so we got up when we could smell it brewing :) Instead of actually reading the Christmas story from Luke or Matthew this year, we just sat and had the kids re-tell it from their memories. We talked for a little while about the story, it's meaning, our favourite parts of the story and it ended up being much more meaningful than rushing through the traditional reading. I love that my kids know the true meaning of Christmas and delaying gifts to talk about God's goodness and gift to us, isn't a hardship for them.

Gifts actually started last night (we have a pre-Christmas gift which the kids know is always PJs and they love that we pretend it's not every year). Here they are last night lined up ready to open pajamas. This year I stuffed small black sheep (Bath & Body Works) into their PJ packages :)

So, dressed in their new PJs (except Mica, whose cozy footed-sleepers were too warm to wear the whole night) the kids opened presents this morning and then we played for awhile and then went sledding. The snow was a little too sticky so we didn't last long even though it was a pretty nice -12 or so. A few more pictures from this morning:Both boys got hockey figurines from their favourite teams (Calgary & Toronto)

Cale got a football (up till now, they've been sharing Egan's) and Egan got a bike helmet (not shown)

The boys love getting joint video game gifts...this year Indiana Jones Lego for Wii and Madden '08 for DS

Mica got a new hat (doesn't she look awesome in hats?), some art supplies (acrylic paints, etc)...

....and an Ipod Shuffle. There was much rejoicing over this item, let me tell you!

Merry Christmas from all of us!