Christmas {Our Family}

We have yet to create our 'official family Christmas traditions'. That may come. For THIS year, we decided to open gifts Thursday evening (since we'd be leaving town Friday).

After supper, we read the Christmas story from Luke 2 while the kids used our Little People Nativity set to act it out.

Then we opened gifts! I could HARDLY wait to give Oliver his Legos. This particular set was a city set with a trash man (among other things) and he had just been building a city with trash men with his old legos!!! Now he had the official "Big Boy Legos" and wow was he excited.

Oh, and the absolute cutest thing: with every gift he opened, he'd yell, "THANK YOU!!!!" with this gigantic grin on his face.

Lily got things to go with her dolls--bottles, diapers (which she is constantly trying to throw away because they're "dirty"), and a stroller. She is SO into babies.

After the presents (and a surprise visit from friends!) we bundled up, got our hot cocoa, and headed out to look at Christmas lights. As usual, the most exciting (read 'gaudy') house is 2 blocks from our house. So we start with that one, and then end with it. Very exciting stuff.

Christmas Eve morning, we opened stocking gifts, and then headed to Drubers for our yearly donut and Santa visit. Ollie was less scared and there was no crying involved--although we almost fell over when he simply requested a 'glazed donut' and then barely ate that. He was pretty nervous about going to see Santa. Poor guy. (For those of you who don't know, Oliver usually eats a giant nut roll by himself--seriously, those things are about that size of my head.)
Lily wasn't so thrilled with Santa yet.




Then, we headed to El Dorado for our Johnson Family Christmas...