My Christmas...

Headed to Stockton for a few days to spend time with the family over Christmas.

Went to Christmas Eve services at my dad's church and the children's leader read a story during the service called Humphrey's First Christmas. It was super cute!!! I would highly recommend it to anyone with young kids looking for a Christian Christmas book.

My mom saw the pic of me kissing a giraffe at the Richmond Street Fair on the blog earlier this year and found this giraffe and got it for me for Christmas. Figured I needed to take another kissing shot.

After my dad, mom and I celebrate Christmas at their house, we always head over to my aunt's house (used to be my grandparent's house) to celebrate Christmas with my mom's family. She's the oldest of nine so it's a really big affair. Ever since I can remember my holidays and family get togethers have always been 30+ people.

Every year my Uncle David decorates the house for Christmas. One room has the "kids" table (I'm the oldest of the grandkids, and I will sit at that table until I probably die). Here's a shot of the centerpiece that he created. Each of the wooden figures has a picture of each of the faces of the kids. We each got cute beanies. No pics of me in the beanie yet.

Here's a pic of my Uncle David with the centerpiece for the adult table. Yes, he and my Uncle Larry built a carousel from scratch. The animals are ornaments strapped onto boxes of cookies. The presents were their gifts to each of us.

After we grabbed our ornaments, we realized that the platform was designed like a Wheel of Fortune wheel and that the kids were going to get to play a game.

We broke into 3 teams and went 3 rounds. Here we are standing around the "wheel" - me, Jennifer, Jonathan, Sara, Scott, Candy and Mike.

Each of the teams received monetary prizes as our Christmas gift. My team of me, Jen and Scott came in second.

Pic of the tree - some years its pretty crazy with gifts covering the entire floor. This year was a bit better when more baking and less gifts.

The stockings...couples share stockings otherwise there really wouldn't be enough room.

For the past 4 years I have gotten two Christmas presents that are my favorite. One is from my parents - I get twelve gift cards individually wrapped designated by month in a container and I get to open the one marked for the month that my mom has written on the tag. YES!!! I wait each month to open each one.

My other favorite Christmas present is from my Auntie Jann. Every year the adult kids (essentially that means you have to be in or graduated from college) receive a puzzle of some sort that has to be solved to get her present ($). One year we received puzzle boxes that we had to solve. Another year we had key locks on each of our boxes, and she gave us a container filled with 200 keys and we had to find our individual key to open our individual box. This year we each received a bag (backpack, purse, etc) locked with a combination lock and three puzzles (sudoku, logic, crossword, number, etc) that we had to solve.

Each puzzle had one of the number answers highlighted. Once we figured out the answer we would have one of the numbers for the combination.

Christmas doesn't really start until about 6p with dinner so here we are at work trying to get the numbers to each of our combinations around 1130 p.m. I think out of all the years that we've done this, this year was the hardest.

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas filled with the celebration of Jesus' birth, family and traditions.