Christmas...with a few pictures...

Because I wanted to write a post about something other than running and my adorable dogs, I decided to give up on my younger sister mailing me a cd of all the hundreds of Christmas pictures we all took before I wrote my Christmas post.  So, there will be missing pictures (sisters in Christmas pj's, good shots of all of us, game playing, etc.), but this should give you all a good overview of the awesome time we had with my family.

Here was the main present I got from my awesome husband.  After I refused to believe him that he had bought my present already, he wrapped this up and labeled it.  It turned out to be a Wii!!  We had a lot of fun with this Christmas day and plenty of good times with it since.

While in WV, we visited a live Nativity scene.  They were short on shepherds and asked my brothers to help out.  Chaz was showing off how thrilled he was to be wearing a dress, but he was a good sport.  It was FREEZING cold outside, though, and I was glad when we could blast the heater on the way home.

Because my family loves to be different, we made a gingerbread barn instead of a house this year.  Daddy was the master piper for the construction and Kass took over most of the piping from there.  Jess put together the fence with a hot glue gun, and everyone else tossed out ideas and threw on decorations.

The end result was pretty darn cute!

Another tradition for special occasions in Dad making breakfast.  On pancake morning, one lucky person makes the "last pancake."  This pancake is the size of a frying pan.  Kass got it this year and managed to finish it off with "Eye of the Tiger" playing in the background.

As always, we made Christmas cookies.  I had been collecting decorations for weeks previous to it.  This was my tree.

One of my brothers cut out two hearts - one for my parents, one for Devin & me.  This was ours.

In addition to the traditional cookie shapes, we have a few unique ones.  This year, Tanner insisted on using a Halloween cookie cutter to make a Holy Ghost cookie.  We also do cacti, steer, and cowboy hats.  Kass gave me a hippo cookie cutter (loooooove it!!), and this was one of the two cookies I made with it.

Christmas Eve, we took the annual photo.  I loved Kate's insistence on wearing blue to "symbolize the night sky over Bethlehem."  Mostly, I just love that she's not afraid to be different.

I also never thought that I was that much taller than my sisters, although I always knew I was the tallest.  Here, it looks extremely obvious.  It is a good picture of us, though.

Here are my three brothers posing.  The ones of them with Devin are on the cd Jess is supposed to send me.  This was a surprisingly good picture, though!

Here, Devin joined my in wearing a "Christmas Costume."  For years, my sisters and I have gone to elaborate lengths with the outfits we sleep in and wear Christmas morning.  Devin has been a good sport about it since joining the family.  Since I don't have any sister pics from this year, here are a few from a couple years back.



I'm sorry this post was almost a month delayed!  It was after all a wonderful Christmas!  Maybe next year I'll have a better collection of pictures, with a more timely post...love you Jess!