Christmas Eve

Christmas eve came around. This is the day when we celebrate Christmas in our little family, and it's pretty much an all-day event.

After breakfast we opened presents, and then spent the rest of the day playing, decorating gingerbread cookies, and eating our traditional meat fondue for dinner (Yummmm!)

Three years ago, we started to do a "go find Baby Jesus" time with the kids, where we go outside (one time to a park, the next two years we stayed closer to the house because I was too chicken sneaking around a dark and quiet park at night setting it all up), find a lighted nativity scene where we read the Christmas story together. It's really a neat thing, but this year it snowed, so we stayed inside. I hid all 27 pieces of a miniature nativity set I have, and the kids had to go find them. They LOVED it! Then we read the Christmas story, and that was our more quiet ending to a very nice celebration.

************

This is how the "opening presents" scenario got started. Do you think they were excited?? The chair in the background is a present from my parents. It is our new "quiet corner", where we can read, or just sit and relax.

Here is Nina's present - she loves to cook, and I found this really cute play kitchen. She was so excited!

Elia was just as excited about his legos

And Alex about the Rokenbok Police car he wanted for a long time (we "inherited" a huge Rokenbok set from our friends and neighbors about a year ago)

Nico was quite pleased to with his loot

Anya is trying out the new chair

We didn't really hear much from Nina for the rest of the morning. She cooked and cooked and was perfectly content.

Reading the Christmas story together