It's a Wonderful Life

Christmas Eve finally arrived!!  Christmas Eve is my favorite day of the entire year!  I love the fun traditions and the anticipation of Christmas morning. I suggested that the kids go out and draw on the drive way to help them pass the time before the festivities began.  I thought it was cute when Jackson lead me outside to see his nativity he drew :) We also passed the time by making those free elf video with our faces.  They never cease to make us laugh.  Here are the close ups of our faces for the video :) haha whenever Erik's elf came on the video we couldn't help but bust out laughing. We had invited the Stakers to have Christmas Eve dinner with us, and we also had signed up for the elders to come.  It was a great group of people to hang out with and celebrate Christmas with.  After dinner (ham, funeral potatoes, rolls, poppy seed dressing salad, layered jello, and veggies) we played our little version of "white el...

The Sunday before Christmas is one of my very favorite days of the year!  Christmas hymns are so much fun to sing and the Sacrament meeting program is guarenteed to be heavy on the music, light on the boring talks (I know I know, there is no such thing as a boring chruch talk if you have the right attitude).  I also must admit that getting into our Christmas finest is one of the great pleasures of Christmas Sunday as well.  This year, I remembered that in the back of Anna's closet was a hand-me-down dress given to us by my friend Hannah Smith who was given it by our friend Julie Walton (haha a hand-me-down three times removed, that's pretty awesome!).  With her gold dress set, I decided to try and find a little bit of gold for each of us.  Belk had the perfect gold ties for the boys, and Kohl's had a gold sweater for me . . . luckily Erik had a gold and blue striped tie already (though to be honest since we really never are around him during church it doesn't...