HAPPY MONDAY and merry post-Christmas! I trust that everyone had a good Christmas holiday? Ours was quiet and spent at home. The weather was super dreary and most of my family was sick at one point or another leading up to Christmas. But! I feel like I’m getting ahead of myself – let’s rewind to about a week BEFORE Christmas, shall we?
In the days leading up to Christmas, we spent a lot of time decorating cookies and gingerbread houses…
And we also managed to check out a nearby illuminated drive-through show this year (we went for the first time last year and my kids loved it!).
We snuggled and had tons of screen time…
And our elves, Finley & Ginger, were busy with their naughty shenanigans.
We baked and decorated even MORE cookies (more than our one family could ever consume in time hahaha)… and made sure to decorate two cookies that represent mommy – excited for the holidays – and daddy – sad because he’s tired.
We made hot cocoa bombs courtesy of S eemo and sipped them while watching a movie by the fireplace..
And woke up on Christmas Eve to find that there was a MOUNTAIN of Christmas presents under the tree! (Someone told me that this is too many Christmas gifts and honestly? That’s like telling parents they’re too strict or too this/that … I think you do what’s right and works for your family and I’ll do what’s right and works for mine 🙃.)
Our doggos also got some fun new toys leading up to Christmas and as you can see Daisy was ALL 👏🏻ABOUT 👏🏻IT 👏🏻.
And we had our Christmas Eve dinner tradition of prime rib with all the fixings … I swear, I like our family Christmas Eve dinner better than I like Thanksgiving. SO GOOD.
After dinner on Christmas Eve, our kids got showered and jammied … someone was feeling grumpy.
I think we were all feeling a little grumpy throughout the week though. We were all staying up later than we normally would (me included) and almost everyone in my family was sick by turns so we were all just tired and cranky. But still! We had to take our annual Christmas selfie with the dogs! This is the best I got:
We tucked everyone into bed and then got ready for Santa to pay a visit to our house …
🤫 I heard a noise in the night and managed to catch a peek of a big guy dressed in a red suit by our fireplace…
CHRISTMAS MORNING! We woke up to POURING, dumping rain! It was SO rainy, I honestly don’t even remember the last time we’ve had a Christmas this wet before (which is good because California needs the rain).
The big kids, of course, were up early but I made them wait for their littlest sister to wake up.
As you can see, our elf had made a little barricade/wall of streamers that the kids needed to run through to get their Santa gifts and I didn’t want A to miss it.
Well… at 930am little A was STILL sound asleep in her room and I was starting to feel bad for the big kids who were jumping with excitement for hours by now so I let them go into her room to wake her up.
And then it felt like Christmas morning really began!! First stop: the fireplace to see what Santa brought and left in our stockings…
SANTA SUCCESS! Everyone was very happy with what they got. We ate Christmas breakfast, which looked a lot like the food we had at our North Pole Breakfast back in November.
Doggos also participating in all the festivities:
And after breakfast, it was time to get to the REAL fun part of the day – opening our mountain of presents! I’ll spare you all the pictures from this time and just show the highlights but know … it took over an hour, maybe closer to two hours to open everything 💀Also, in the past what we’ve done is divvied up the gifts into smaller piles for each recipient (so E has her pile of gifts to open, D has his, etc etc). This year, though, D suggested just each taking turns going to the tree, finding a gift with your name on it and opening them one by one like that. We did it that way and it was so much fun!
Some memories I don’t want to forget:
- A opening her first gift, which was clothes, and saying … “aw but I wanted toys, not clothes” 💀but then later, she opened a brand new purple tutu sent from her uncle & aunt in SoCal and she SCREAMED “A NEW TUTU FOR DANCE CLASS!!! I NEED TO WEAR IT TOMORROW!!!” (she doesn’t have dance again until Jan)
- E loving her gifts but having literally no reaction to anything. She’ll never be the kid who gives a big emotive response to something (unless she’s really upset) and I’ve learned that just because she isn’t gushing and screaming doesn’t mean she’s not excited or happy.
- D, of course, having the best reactions to most of his gifts aka “OMG! WHAT IS IT?! IT’S A _____!!!!!” for everything 😂 My sweet boy.
- A throwing a tantrum halfway through because she only wanted to open “big gifts” and the ones she had left were smaller ones *insert HUGE eyeroll* – I sent her to her room (yes on Christmas day) for this attitude.
- J opening his PPG husband swag and having the best smile on his face 🤩my cohost & I got matching ones for our husbands bwahahaah.
After we opened all the gifts, we ate a late lunch … and then just bummed around all day long. I ate a TON of cheese and ended up needing to take a Zyrtec before bed LOL. It was worth it tho. Give me all the cheese, please.
For dinner, we ate leftovers and a hodgepodge of all the snackie things I’d had out all day. It was a definite “eat what you want, don’t eat what you don’t want” meal. I think A ate an entire dinner of just crackers 😂 We ended Christmas day with birthday cake for Jesus!
We were going to watch Encanto as a family after dinner but honestly, it was already 8pm and after a whole week of basically no bedtimes, I was convinced that part of A’s bad attitude was because she was overtired. So we scrapped the movie night (decided to watch on Sunday instead) and sent everyone to bed. I was also just SO drained by this point. I don’t think I’d had a fully restful night since our friends came and visited us the weekend we hosted our big Christmas party. There was always a dog or a sick kid (or sick husband!) waking me up or needing something. I went to bed on Christmas night and slept a FULL 12 hours. No joke. I woke up once to pee and then immediately fell back asleep. When I finally emerged at noon (YES NOON THE NEXT DAY), J looked at me and was like “you didn’t JUST wake up did you?” (I think he thought I got up and just relaxed in bed awhile). No sir, I did in fact JUST wake up.
This year Christmas, while sweet and festive, also felt like …. I was constantly playing catch up. I know that might sound silly after seeing all the pictures of the fun things we did but I actually had way more I wanted to do (go ice skating, visit Widmer World, etc etc) that never ended up happening. Even simple things, like wanting to watch A Christmas Story on TV, didn’t happen this year. I felt like we were so busy in December and then the last week everyone got sick and I just had no energy left in me to fake it. So we stayed in (which worked because it was rainy and people weren’t feeling great), did what we felt like doing and skipped what we didn’t feel like doing, and overall just enjoyed time with each other this Christmas.
Coming up on the blog for the rest of December, I think I’ll be skipping my What’s Up Wednesday post and just do a Dec monthly reading recap post. We’ll be in SoCal with J’s side of the family for New Year’s but once we get back in Jan, be ready because I’ll have lots of fun new content coming!
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