Christmas celebrations

Well, now that we're completely in the New Year, I better catch up on what happened in December. As you may know, I was not as ready as I've been in past years, but as you also know, Christmas comes anyway!

We started our celebrations by having some friends join us for our annual Christmas Eve dinner and party. We usually eat earlier in the evening, but Thomas got a last-minute call to work so we postponed our dinner until 8:00 p.m. We spent the evening preparing for dinner and tracking Santa on the NORAD site -- pretty cool -- they used Google Earth and you could see his reindeer and sleigh scooting from place to place!

After a delicious dinner of Honeybaked Ham, roasted potatoes, homemade applesauce and fresh pumpkin pie we settled into our annual Christmas routine...play games, tell the Christmas story, read "A visit from St. Nicholas" and hang our stockings.

Afton was super excited for Christmas this year. She really REALLY wanted a sock monkey (I have no idea why!) so when she headed for bed that was all she talked about.

Fortunately, Santa came through with the monkey and "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" DVD to go with it. We also received a family gift of a Wii video game system from our parents (thanks Mom and Grandma Bette!) and several other items.

Unfortunately, since I ran out of time, Thomas and Afton received the "ingredients" for their homemade items. Thomas got some denim, snaps and a pattern for me to make him a new denim shirt jacket. Afton received some totally cute cartoon monkey-print flannel and a p.j. pattern. She announced that she'll make the pajamas so she can enter them in the fair next summer. Sounds good to me! Wonder it Thomas wants to learn to sew too....LOL!

We all had a wonderful day spending time together relaxing and learning how to set up a Wii! (It was a lot more involved that I thought it would be.) Then Afton explored the new games that came with the system while Thomas and I sat back and watched.

On Boxing Day (12/26 for you Americans...) we headed south to visit Thomas's family and my cousins. We had some vouchers to stay at a Radisson, so we enjoyed a little mini-vacation. Yankee even got to come along! Afton had a quiet holiday this year as both Thomas and I were still working. Maybe we'll do something more fun next year...we'll just have to wait and see what happens!