Christmas Eve

We had a nice, relaxing Christmas Eve. First of all, my parents & brother Matt came over and we all enjoyed Mark's scrumptious vegetable beef soup (that name does it no justice...just think sirloin tip steak, cremini mushrooms, etc). Yu-um! Then, since Noah & Lincoln are a little bit young to pay attention & get a whole lot from reading the Christmas story from Luke 2...we opted to watch a short video about the birth of Christ.

As you can see from this picture that Mark snapped (during the video) the boys weren't exactly mesmerized during the entire video, but they paid attention most of the time...and at least they stayed seated on the couch.

The video was a nice way to emphasize the reason for celebrating Christmas, and helped to create a visual image of the story for the kids before setting up our nativity piece by piece, which Noah particularly enjoyed helping with. Then my parents gave a nice little gift to each of the boys...their own little nativity of Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus. Here is Noah adoring his.

Then it was time to pull out Noah's "stripey-Santa-hat" and read 'The Night Before Christmas' together.



And we couldn't send the boys off to bed without first putting out cookies for Santa!

Noah was so pleased to be the one to carry the cookies over and leave them by the fireplace.
Lastly, I have to mention that even though we don't usually have especially big struggles with the boys' bedtimes at night...Christmas Eve was particularly easy getting them to go to bed! An early Christmas present for us? What a nice night.