Our Simple Christmas - with a few surprises!

We have had a busy year with a few very big changes (i.e. bishop) so we decided to keep our Christmas celebrations very low key. Our main goal was to spend time together.

Christmas Eve day was pretty warm so we all worked together to rake some leaves in the front yard... although, as you can see, some of us worked harder than others :)

Our ancient rosemary bush had a hard time with the drought this year and we lost a good portion of it so we decided to get a rosemary tree to replace it - after it served as a beautiful Christmas tree first of course.

We acted out the traditional Christmas storywith a rather protective Mary

and a somewhat reluctant shepherd and got to bed early so Santa could come!

Christmas morning is always tricky when it falls on a Sunday - we used the incentive to our advantage and told the kids they could open their stockings after they got ready for church.
This year all the wards in our building combined for a 9:oo sacrament meeting - which was really nice as it gave us the rest of the day to just hang out together and enjoy the fun of watching kids open presents.

Eli can now wrestle to his heart's content without worrying about tears from brothers.

Here's Peter showing off some of the stocking prizes

and with the orange robot dinosaur he wanted.

Leah with her "American Girl" doll.
She named her Clara after the girl in the Nutcracker.



And here is the surprise that the kids woke up to on Christmas morning...Harry - a beautiful long-haired dachshund.
No, we did not get a dog.
A friend of ours found himself in a bit of a bind on Christmas Eve and we agreed to take care of his dog for a week until things got straightened out.

The kids had a great time, but even Lincoln realized that we probably aren't ready to have a dog in our family just yet!