My plan on Christmas Eve day was to clean and bake goodies, go to the candle light communion at the church where I run the graphics, then to Grandmas for dinner. I planned to end up at my house with several guests including Mike's mom and dad, my parents and brother and even a big round man in a red suit carrying a load of presents for all in attendance. The threat of storm threw everything off schedule pretty early in the day.
I got a call that we were going to move the celebration and dinner up at Grandma's to 3. I hurried to finish the graphics for the evening service, thinking the entire time I was working on them that the service would be canceled to do weather. I didn't get my baking done, nor my housed fully cleaned as intended. We met at Grandma's for pizza at 3. We left my house just as it started to sleet.
Growing up my entire life, Santa has shown up at my grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a sack full of presents for everyone in attendence. One of my favorite Christmas memories is the year that my dad and Santa had the same orange cowboy boots. I began to realize that someone, Papa, my uncle or my dad would always have something happen about the time that Santa would arrive. They would have to check cows or run to town or something. As the second youngest grandchild grew older, it was hinted that Santa may not be frequenting his stop at Grandmas. The youngest grandchild came along however, to keep the tradition living. Then as he grew older my son, the only great grandchild on that side of the family. The last few years we've taken the names we have drawn to buy presents for and placed them in the bag.
This year because he was the only person young enough to experience and appreciate the magic of Santa, it was decided to begin this tradition at my house rather than "invite" Santa to my grandparents' house.
We still drew names for the gift exchange around Thanksgiving so we opened presents shortly after the meal.
My brother runs the sound system right along side of us and we learned sometime after arriving to Grandma's that the evening service would indeed be cancled. By 730-8 we began to disperse to brave the storm home. By this time the sleet had become quite a layer on the vehicles and roads and the first ever blizzard warning was being sounded by the weather man. We loaded up to leave as well to prepare for Christmas Number 2 at my house.
Here are some images of Christmas No. 1
The Princess enjoyed the wrapping and seemd to pick up on tearing into the gifts pretty quickly.
The first of many hot wheels to be opened by Squirt.
Squirt doesn't ALWAYS like having a shutterbug mom!
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