This is the second post about my awesome Christmas with the family, in Austin. The first post can be seen here.
As we ended the last post, the elves and Santa and prepared everything for Christmas morning. You may also remember that I had ALL of my children in my house for Christmas. What a wonderful setting...
We begin with Christmas morning. This video shows the kids entering the living room, where Santa has left their gifts. We've adopted a tradition of coving the "entryway" with Christmas wrapping paper, so that the kids can't see beyond, until the break through:
The kids really loved their gifts. In our family, Santa brings four thing - something you want, something you need, something to wear and something to read. This helps manage expectations from the children. L received a play kitchen set, when she absolutely loves. G-Man received the Skylanders video game...which he adores. The rest of the morning was spent in glorious consumption, as we all unwrapped gifts for each other:
My oldest son gets creative with the gift tags, at times. Here's just one example of a gift that he gave to his wife. As I may have mentioned before, she's pregnant with my first grandchild:
It seems that L was a little tired from the gift experience, and just wanted to watch her cartoons ; )
The aftermath of Christmas morning can be seen in this short video clip:
I enjoyed spoiling all of the kids. I loved watching them just sit an enjoy their gifts. Yup, I'm a softy ; )
After opening gifts, we were treated to an incredible breakfast...once again, created by my amazing wife. The highlight was Creme Bruleé French Toast. Yup, you read that right:
One additional Christmas note. While growing up, my family engaged in a really fun activity at Christmas. It's called The Twelve Days of Christmas. Basically, you select a family and anonymously deliver fun gifts to them each night, leading up to Christmas. Some people leave the gift, ring the doorbell and run. My method is the simply sneak to the doorstep, during the middle the of night, and give the family something fun to open each morning. I've been dying to revive the tradition, but we rarely spend Christmas at our house. This year, I selected three families and made the run for the twelve nights leading up to Christmas. Sometimes, I had to be really sneaky, especially when people were awake after midnight, or when household pets signaled my arrival. The families all loved the fun. One even created a series of pictures to commemorate the gifts. They're an awesome family that we love:
Back at our house, G-Man really wanted to walk the dog - little does he know what a chore that can be - and had the chance to actually hold the leash ; ) I'm not sure who is walking whom:
The day after Christmas, we discovered that both kids had conjunctivitis, or pink-eye. We had to sanitize everything they had touched in the previous 24 hours, just to be safe. This includes all Christmas presents and toys from across the house:
Fortunately, my brilliant wife caught it early, so that we didn't have a full-blown epidemic in the house.
Overall, despite this little set-back, we had an amazing Christmas. My heart is so full of joy and gratitude for having my family together, if only for a couple of days. My children know me well, when they bought a special ornament to commemorate the occasion. I'll treasure it always...and look forward to the next time that we can all be together. Merry Christmas!!!!
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