We started off celebrating the holiday eve with some fitting holi-cakes, every since Halloween when we made ghost pancakes our kids have been really into seasonally shaped pancakes so for Christmas we made reindeer. We use to make Rudolph-cakes but the kiddos got into the cranberries and ate them all so we just have to resort to making normal reindeer (normally they had 2 antlers but Sophie ate one before we got a pic).
After breakfast we suited up for the traditional Christmas eve Elf viewing at Gardner Village. We have gone of Christmas eve for 3 years now and I love it because we have the whole place to ourselves, unfortunately this year however we got a bit wet on our elf-venture. More than seeing the elves the kids were most thrilled with watching the ducks, especially the one with the craziest hair-do I have ever seen!
After finally prying-dragging the kids away from the ducks we went through the rest of the elf displays. We even stopped to see Santa's naughty and nice list where we still noted Josh and Sophie on the nice list and Camille on the naughty. We didn't see Phoebe's name, but she swears she saw it on the nice list.
After making it through the elves we went home to enjoy all the snow that started falling right after we left and realax! We got to cuddle, watch movies, and since I made our dinner in the morning (our traditional lasagna, bread, salad & Italian Sodas) and bought pre-made bread rolls and gingerbread dough I didn't have to spend the whole day cooking, which was AWESOME! Note to self: I need to remember how nice this year was for future years and not try and overdo it with making it all from scratch or leaving it all to the last minute to put together.
After dinner all the kids were REALLY excited to finally decorate the cookies that they help me cut out earlier that day. I was really surprised on the much improved decorating skills we saw this year, only Josh did the blob decor this year.
When we cleaned up our messed and hosed down a couple of our children they got to open their Christmas eve pajama pails to see what cute things the pj elves brought them this year.
We then did our reading of he nativity while we acted it out with our little people sets, this is one of Phoebe's very favorite things to do all season.
We then had all of the kids pick out one cookie to leave Santa on his plate and then quickly ran out to throw the reindeer some carrots out on the very snowy front lawn.
Afterwards we quickly ran up to get in bed, gave our traditional do not go downstairs before you come in mom and dad's room talk, gave kisses to all and let 4 very excited kiddos dream about all the exciting things they might get on Christmas. We took the rest of the evening to put put all the Christmas presents, watch It's a Wonderful Life on TV, & pre-make Christmas breakfast cinnamon rolls and dinner time crescent rolls.
