Because Noah and Kristi had to leave on the December 23rd to join Kristi’s family in Texas,we had two Christmas mornings at our house this year. As is the tradition at our house, the children gather on the stairs, not earlier than 7:30 and start singing Christmas Carols to signal to the adults that it’s time for the merriment to begin! We loved actually being able to watch a few of our grandchildren open their gifts from us. Since they are scattered from both coasts to Hawaii this year, we loved actually having a few of them in our home!
Everybody enjoyed everybody else’s gifts:
Our friends the moose showed up outside of our window just as the kids were opening their presents:
Then we cloistered the parents so they could open their present which was the same present that we the other adults were getting. Grandfather absolutely the others couldn’t see it until the next Christmas morning.
After the revelry we had a fun breakfast together. The Jackson Soufflé was perfect!
And then it was on to building Gingerbread Houses from the new super-star store….Trader Joe’s. After searching them out everywhere we go on the East and West coast for such a long time for this favorite store finally arrived in Salt Lake! It was the biggest opening day in Trader Joes’ history! Anyway, on to the Gingerbread Houses.
Interestingly, this day also happened to be Kristi’s birthday so we had fun celebrating ALL day with her! That is when we weren’t cleaning out the attic in our old house which we had sold several months earlier. The buyers are a darling family who allowed us to wait until the kids came home for Christmas to get “their stuff” out of the attic. It was a much bigger job than we had anticipated. There was stuff up there that everyone had forgotten about for many years! We were so busy sorting it out and trying to figure out what to do with it all that I don’t think anyone took pictures. Maybe it was just as well. It was not a pretty sight! Squirrels had been having wild parties up there including digging into some of the boxes to store apples from the yard for the winter.
In any case, everyone enjoyed celebrating Kristi’s birthday with her. Charity could only find 16 birthday candles so Charity suggested that each one should represent two birthdays. Kristi said that she loved the 16 candles and divulged that her family had forgotten her 16th birthday in the Christmas mayhem and she didn’t even mention it for a couple of days. I’m sure her delightful family were horrified when she reminded them! So Kristi, not to even mention it!
That night we went to see the Christmas lights on Temple Square along with (literally) about a million other people. I would call it a mistake as we were struggling to keep track of 20 people (9 adults and 11 kids) if it wasn’t for this picture….which we got with all the ones we could find at the moment.
Christmas Eve coming up!
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