Christmas 2016

So we Christmased.  Two weeks ago.  And it was ok.

I know I'm a bit of a downer but Christmas is not my favorite holiday.  I really want it to be about Jesus and I try to make it be about Jesus.  We have special family nights every week of December where we talk about the prophescies of Christ's coming and his birth and all those who visited the baby Jesus.  I read and reread the accounts in Luke and Matthew and 3 Nephi of Christ's birth and this year I had some really interesting insights about Mary (That she is the epitome of faith--she accepted her role as the mother of the Savior of the World without fully understanding what all that entailed).

But in the end, Christmas is about gifts.  And now that my kids understand that they're getting a bunch of gifts their expectations sore, along with my stress.  Who can look at a child's face, bright with the anticipation of Christmas and not worry about crushing all his little dreams?  And to make it worse, this year Alice didn't even ask for anything so we just had to guess at how to maintain her innocence.  It's just too stressful.  If I mess up a holiday like St. Patrick's Day or Valentine's Day, no big deal.  It's a small holiday anyway, but Christmas is the big one.

Add to that the postpartum stuff I had going on and December was a rough a month.

But we got through it and the kids enjoyed Christmas.  Although Alice was disappointed at the number of gifts she got.  Maybe it's time to re-evaluate our Christmas gift policy.

Here's the break down:

Christmas Eve morning I ran a 5k since this is the first year in a long time that we didn't host dinner.  I was really sad not to host this year, but with the number of Bakers there are in the area now plus Emma and Travis drove out, it just didn't make sense to do it at our house.  That afternoon, we went to Allen and Sahar's for dinner, Bingo and the nativity, which was the worst nativity I've ever put on.

Greg's aunt sent this super cute outfit for Zora for Christmas Eve

Cora as Mary with Wesley as the shepherd.

Rex as Joseph, Cora as Mary and Alice as Anna.

Henry was the angel this year and stabbed Mary with his star.

Matching the Robins cousins who were all in Seattle--Rex had just thrown a royal tantrum about not liking his Bingo prize, being tried, not having friends at school, math being too hard etc etc.  Being a mom and know when and when not to react is hard.

Santa came.

Christmas Day the kids were up at 6:30, which isn't bad.  We left them look at their presents from Santa since Santa doesn't wrap gifts at our house and open their stockings before getting ready for 9 am church.  After church, Greg had to write a few checks for the Bishop so Alice threw a tantrum in the car on the way home about having to wait longer to open presents.  We barely had time to put the traditional baked french toast in the oven before Greg got home.  We opened presents.  We ate breakfast, or at least Greg and I did.  We played with presents for a bit.  We drove up to Greg's sister's house in Greensboro and spent the rest of the day just hanging out.  We drove home and went to bed.

Santa brought Henry a bike with pedals

The highlight of the day was the QT gift cards Santa brought

Christmas morning j

 Sunday Best:

 Opening presents: