Merry Christmas, part 1

We have had a wonderful Christmas and hope all of you have as well. I have a lot of pictures to share, but will break it up into several posts since it takes so long to upload photos to blogger. We'll start with Christmas Eve...



Here is everyone before we left for church and the Christmas pageant.

We always host Christmas Eve dinner after the pageant. We had 23 sitting down, plus the baby girls. J.'s two sisters and their families and a Japanese grad student and his family joined us.


On Christmas morning everyone waits upstairs until things are ready. (Meaning the coffee is made and I have my contacts in so I can see.) Then the children line up youngest to oldest and come downstairs. This is a tradition from J.'s family; I had no stairs in my house growing up. The babies slept horribly that night, so J. and I had been up for several hours already. Everyone else started to wake up at the more reasonable hour of 7:45.



Gifts under the tree being examined.






The first thing we do after coming downstairs is light the candles in the advent wreath and the center Christ candle and have a prayer.


M. with G. (on left) and L. (on right)





Opening stockings.
To be continued...

Comments

LawMommy said…
So much about the woodwork in your house (particularly the three large windows that can be seen behind your head in the one shot of all of you by the table) and the staircase - remind me of the house I grew up in.

My five siblings and I also lined up down the staircase when we came down on Christmas morning.

It looks like you had a lovely holiday.

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