Christmas Morning

On Christmas Eve we read Critter's Christmas and acted out the Nativity with all of the little people (we love our Little People Nativity Set).

 Santa came.

We all got to wear our new Christmas pajamas. Angela made Christine's pajamas.

The big hit presents were Christine's Minnie Mouse couch, her new plastic food, and a new baby doll.  When the plastic food was unwrapped, we immediately had to get Lamb Chops and feed her.

The other big present was Christine's Dora's backpack and map that Angela made her. I think they are outstanding. The map of course led to Gigi's house. She led the way as we went up to Gigi's house after Christmas morning.

(Jeff wrote the above, now this is Angela) Even though this was Christine's third Christmas, it felt like her first real Christmas. She got Christmas and the idea of Santa Claus and opening presents. Christmas morning really was magical with Christine. I loved getting to shop for Christine and maybe went a little over budget. A few days before Christmas, we took Christine to see Santa Claus at the Galleria where she was able to ask Santa for a baby doll. Christmas Eve we made homemade Chimichangas (that turned out sooooo good, almost as good as my mom's) Then Christmas morning was so much fun. We had orange rolls while we opened our stockings- Christine loved her snowman stocking and was sooooo excited to find a plastic candy cane filled with jelly beans in it. Opened presents- which Christine was ecstatic about, it was hard for her to wait her turn while mommy and daddy opened some presents. Then when all the fun was unwrapped we had eggnog pancakes with cranberry sauce with our "yummy Christmas drink" as Christine called it (really it was frothy smoothies). The pancakes were good, but not Christmas-morning-good, so we will have to try something else next year. This year I loved beginning our traditions, and I am so grateful that I had a little break from the pregnancy miseries during my second trimester to enjoy Christmas.

Christmas Eve Dinner

I know, we're just now posting about Christmas Eve!  Better late than never. Here's Christine helping cook the peppermint brownies.

We put Christine in charge of the main course.  So what did we have?

Some delicious plastic produce! Notice her great posture and table manners.

After we ate the plastic food, we decided that we needed something a little more substantial.  We made beef chimichangas with spanish rice, refried beans, guacomole, topped with sour cream, tomatoes and lettuce.

Deep frying the chimichangas proved to be more difficult than it appeared. It took most of the batch for me to finally get some that looked pretty.  But even the less pretty ones were still delicious!!

Our Christmas Card

For the last of our Christmas posts, here is our Christmas card from 2012. We took these photos in Jessica's backyard over Thanksgiving. I love how Christine's ear warmer is not covering her ears! oops. Here's a few outtakes.

Crafting for Christmas

Christine has been a glittering pro since she was one (evidence here) but I think her skills have improved some. Here we are painting modge podge onto cardboard stars that we cut out from cereal boxes and folded to be 3D, then covered in silver glitter. Afterwards Christine picked out ribbon that we glued on to make them into pretty present toppers. Christine LOVED it and wanted to keep glittering forever! I spent a bit of time on pinterest in December (ok I always spend a lot of time on pinterest) collecting ideas for Christmas crafts and activities for me and Christine to do together (okay and Daddy too!) We pulled out the water colors and colored pictures with Christine's oil pastels and cut out all sorts of shapes from paper. I am a bit biased, but I think Christine is very talented with the paintbrush. Her favorite technique was to mix black with all the other water colors but instead of becoming a mess, the colors always looked more saturated. Her best piece was a landscape painting of gigi's pool. It's not the Adirondacks, but it's all she knows. 

The best pinterest find though was a nativity memory game that we printed out and laminated. Christine loves matching games and is exceptionally good at them (I don't even have to try to let her win, she wins even if I am trying to beat her!)  We played it for endless hours. Good thing Santa Claus brought us an Elmo memory game or we would still be playing our Christmas version.

Setting up our Christmas Tree

Okay, I probably should hurry and finish posting my Christmas pictures before the end of January!

Usually we put up our tree immediately after Thanksgiving, but Jeff had another residency interview to go to so we had to wait to put our Christmas tree up until December 2nd.

We are still using our little 4 foot Christmas tree we bought at an after Christmas 90% off sale when we were engaged. It has been a good little tree and perfect for our tiny apartment. But we are soooo excited to get a real tree next year.

Christine was a good helper and enjoyed putting the ornaments on their hooks.

Good thing I took this picture when I did, because the lower half of the lights on the tree died a couple days later. All the more reason to get a full size tree next year!