Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Christmas, New Years, and Beyond

Well we had a lovely holiday season. Hope everyone else did, too. My brother joined us for Christmas and the kids loved having their tallest Uncle around for several days. With Christmas on a Sunday we had to come up with a plan for presents and dealing with 9:00 church. Wait, that sounded bad. We didn't "deal" with church, we just had to plan differently because we had the early time. Sacrament meeting was a beautiful addition to our Sunday celebration of Christ's birth. We decided that we would just do "Santa" before church and save everything else for after and it worked nicely. We had our traditional breakfast of orange and cinnamon rolls chased by a bunch of candy from stockings. After church we got down to the business of presents and family time. Greg's parents and siblings joined us later in the afternoon and we had a nice Christmas dinner and played games afterwords. Greg and I broke down and bought an unnecessarily huge HDTV a couple months ago and called that Christmas for each other. Paul brought lots of movies to watch on the new TV, we had an extreme abundance of snacks and goodies (thanks to amazing friends and neighbors) and we had such a nice time together as a family. More than anything else, I love having family around to be with. Christmas brings us all together and magic happens!

We had to wake up the kids on Christmas morning. They were so sleepy.



Santa used really pretty, fancy gold wrapping paper for the Wildings this year.

David's ONLY request was a "red mote ca-troll helicopter." Santa came through for him.









It was good fun watching Paul get Elizabeth dressed in tights and her Christmas dress.





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A week or two before Christmas Andrew and Nathan participated in a children's choir that our neighbor put together for a YW personal progress goal. They sang at her grandpa's retirement home. It was a good experience for the boys to perform for elderly people who always seem so happy to see the younger set come and brighten their day.

But now school is back in session, we're into a New Year and life continues to treat us well. Happy New Year to all!