Merry Merry!

 

Christmas time has come and gone...way too quickly this year!  In our quest to avoid the hustle and bustle that can overcome the season, we tried our best to focus on time together and enjoying our little family, and succeeded some of the time at least. It's never easy to be away from our families out West at the holidays, but with so much to catch up on after our long trip over Thanksgiving, we enjoyed the slower pace of staying home and not traveling.  But it didn't stay slower for long -- there is always so much going on during December!

 And it really was a great Christmas season, filled with dinners and evenings with friends, school concerts, plus lots of yummy food, too many presents, and even some snow (the morning AFTER Christmas, but we sure didn't complain!)  It was a really fun month!


Here are some of the photo highlights:

Pictures from McKinley's School Concert, where she got to sing a duet as a surprise for us.  She just loves her teacher and her class this year!

A Christmas Nativity with friends (with sons who are good sports!)

Way too many Christmas treats, including some very creative additions to our annual Christmas cookie frosting. McKinley's gingerbread became Rapunzel from Tangled, and Milt decided he wanted to use his Star Wars shaped cutters for the holiday.  Maddox really liked eating the Darth Vader cookies with BLACK frosting, which in case you're wondering does all kinds of interesting things to your digestive system.

 All month, Kennedy just absolutely could not stop touching the ornaments on the tree.  Apparently, it's just not something she can control, no matter how many times she got in trouble for it.

Christmas morning excitement shows in the kids faces in their cute Christmas jammies.  These kids will smile and do whatever we say when it's almost time to come downstairs!

Santa gifts - success!  We are all still wondering how Santa could have possibly decided Kennedy wasn't naughty this year.  "Naughty" must have a pretty loose interpretation up north. 

These pictures of gifts pretty much sum up the themes of what the kids asked for this year:  Maddox - anything Star Wars (with a SW blaster gun & Darth Vader gloves), McKinley- anything Harry Potter (with Hermione's wand that lights up), and Kennedy-Princess things and dress-up (with a Jasmine dress-up set).  They were all very happy with their gifts, and felt very loved by everyone.  Thank you!

For Christmas Dinner we got to have some friends from church over, including our wonderful Sister missionaries.  We love these two (Sister Pallas and Sister Soolefai), and we were so glad we got to spend Christmas evening with them!



And the morning after Christmas we got our snow!  Here Maddox is sporting his Batman snow-attire he got in his stocking.  What a great after Christmas treat to have snow! (If you're wondering where the actual "playing in the snow" pictures are...I was too cold to venture out, so this is the only one I took!  I'm freezing out here!)

We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas season, and that you also got to spend time with friends and family this year.  We are truly blessed to have such great people in our lives, and we missed those of you we didn't get to see this holiday season!  All our love for a great 2011!