An Early Christmas

A couple of months ago, we got a surprise phone call from my brother Brent. He was calling to share the happy news that he is engaged to the lovely Emily! And that they would be getting married in Salt Lake City... two days after Christmas! After we were done rejoicing, we sat down to book our flights and realized the best option would be to fly to Utah on Christmas Eve. With four kids, bringing Christmas on the plane is not an option, so we sent a pleading message to Santa via our family Christmas Elf and arranged to have ours delivered a few days early.

So, on December 22nd, we sat down to our traditional Jerusalem dinner. This year we had pan fried tilapia, a cream cheese crab spread, olives, roasted nuts, roasted garbanzos, some orange/mango fruit candies, and a variety of cheeses and fresh fruits. It was a yummy start to the evening, getting us ready for the reading of the nativity story.

My family always read the story together, but Andrew comes from a slightly bigger family and they always acted out all the parts - something he would like to continue. So we give it a pretty good shot, but next year we might have to recruit another family to help us round it out. This year we had:

Mary and Joseph with the baby (not real this year) in a manger


and the three wise men with a little lost sheep.
We came very close to having a ladybug, but Andrew managed to talk Peter down from the edge on that one.

We woke up on the 23rd to find that Santa had received our note and it was Christmas morning!
This was the first year we've done stockings, so we started the morning by discovering all the wonderful goodies tucked into them... they turned out to be full of things that would be great fun for the plane ride to Utah!
After taking a break to nourish our hungry tummies, we opened more presents and then got down to the business of playing... here are a few of the favorites

And yes, that is a broom that Eli is opening - it was a hit! He's always stealing my broom and carrying it around the house (much to the detriment of my walls and other people since it's about 3 times longer than he is) so we finally got him his own Eli-sized broom and life is now much safer around here.