Christmas 2014

The holiday season started with the Knight Family tradition of attending the Primary Children's Hospital Festival of Trees.  The huge gingerbread houses are by far everyone's favorite but this year the trees dedicated to babies who spent time in the NICU tugged at my heart strings extra hard.  This year we also took advantage of taking a photo with Santa...yes we have decided to start the tradition of sticking our timid children on the lap of some bearded old man and take pictures as they scream.  Although as you can tell by the photos below our kids didn't seem impressed by the big guy.

The night before Christmas we gathered at the Moultrie Farm where the traditions continued with singing our favorite carols by the tree light.  Clay's family are all really musical people and it is fun to sing with people who know all the words to Christmas songs (because I, for one, have no idea half the time...I usually just hum or make up words about Jesus or warm fires because all Christmas songs talk about that at one point or another).  The grandchildren all got Christmas PJs and they decided to make a human pyramid with the twins as the topper (with the help of Clay and I...of course...no Christmas ER visits for us).

Christmas morning brought a thick layer of snow, which was great because there was a very good chance that it was going to be a brown Christmas.  Clay woke up cheery as usual and wished me a Merry Christmas...I, on the other hand, woke up tired and muttered something along the lines of  "you too".  With that Clay was off to get the kids, who had been awake and talking to each other for a good half hour.

I rolled out of bed and headed down stairs where Joy was quietly wining as she does each morning.  After the twins and the puppy were fed we moved on to presents...but first I wanted to take a photo of our first Christmas morning.  The kids are always super active in the morning so having them hold still for a photo was...awesome?  But we decided not to stress about getting the "perfect" shot because no one likes grumpy kids (or grumpy parents) on Christmas.

The kids had already practiced unwrapping gifts at the Moultrie Farm the night before and were in a great tearing mood.  So we helped them out with the first tear and then they went to town.  Sometimes they got distracted after tearing off a large piece of paper but we finally managed to get the gifts unwrapped.  The kids were a little more excited about the boxes and paper than they were about the actual gifts (but I guess that is to be expected).

Once gift opening was done we set out to go to the Knight Family's house for Christmas Day.  My dad stayed with the kids at the house while the rest of us made our way to the elementary school to go sledding on the fresh snow.  It was a blast but I think the dogs had the best time out of all of us.  The snow was about half their body and Joy had to leap when she ran to get above it (we also had to warm her up real good back at the house because she had little snowball stuck to her).  Before we left for the night we played games and ended with the acting out the manger scene.  The Knight tradition is a little off because we use old dance costumes as clothing for the actors (Clay was an animal, Avonlea and I were angels and Rhett was baby Jesus).  One day we may get more legit looking clothing but getting ready with crazy clothes is half the fun.

Christmas has always been a stressful but fun holiday and I have found that having the twins has made the season so much more magical.

For fun I thought I would post links to Christmas' of Old.  (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)  It is a little funny to see how we all have changed.