Christmas

On Christmas Eve, we spent the morning with Great Grandma Allred and Great Aunt Sandra's family.  Great Grandma Allred is literally crazy, so we never know what to expect, but she does pretty well with the girls and the girls get along with her by teasing her back.  (Below, Great Grandma is tapping Claire on the head with a pencil.)  Great Grandma does not remember much, so we always have to try to remind her of who we are.  This time, she spent quite a while hitting on Jason.  She said, "Boy, you sure are handsome!" to him more times than I could count.  :)

The second half of Christmas Eve, we spent at our friend's home.  We had a double celebration there: Aksel's 2nd birthday and Finnish Christmas Eve.  (They are from Finland, where the biggest celebrations are on Christmas Eve, not Christmas Day.)  They treated us to an amazing feast.  Below, the kids are eating about five desserts at the same time and loving every minute of it.

Here is my good friend, Elina, the talented cook for the evening.  And a glimpse at how happy the world would be if I were tall.

On Christmas Eve, the girls slept in until about 7:15am.  Merry Christmas to us!  They then came downstairs hand-in-hand to discover the scene below.  Santa had brought them a dollhouse and a train set!  [A side note: ever since we have combined the girls into the same bedroom (on a bunk bed), they get up together and always hold hands to come find us.  Very sweet.]

The girls enjoyed opening their gifts that morning.  According to Gabby, her favorite gift is the set of dolls from "Brave" that Claire gave her.  Claire says her favorite gift is the Dream Light that Gabby picked out for her.  I guess Santa didn't need to invest in the big doll house after all....  (Luckily, they are spending a lot of time with that dollhouse too.)

For Christmas dinner, we had some old friends from NYC over, who recently moved to our area.  It was good to have some motivation to cook a real meal.  We also kept our tradition of acting out the section in Luke about Christ's birth.  Below, Gabby is Mary and Claire is Joseph.  Gabby kept wanting to act it out over and over, playing different parts and was sad when she was told it was time for bed.