I thought Advent went by quickly, but our three-day-long Christmas extravaganza flew by even more rapidly!
As always, our celebration began Christmas Eve morning, with a breakfast of Christmas Crunch:
New on Christmas Eve this year was putting the final touches on Lego Hogwarts Castle, a project the Fab Five worked on throughout Advent:
We had our “pick out dinner” for lunch as we have for the last few years, and it may have been the best one yet! In addition to our Christmas Eve favorites, which included a few favorites from tea parties, too, we added a Volpi Salame plus a large basil roltini.
After lunch, we headed to church, where Ladybug had the solo for the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City.”
I especially enjoyed the Quempas Celebration.
It was nice to get a picture of the Fab Five in the newly renovated church sanctuary after the service:
We drove through the Way of Lights on the way home:
And then I took all of the pictures!
It’s always exciting to light all of the candles in the Advent Wreath!
Jesus’ birthday cake turned out a little better than last year’s, but not by much, because it fell apart a bit on one side. At least I could get a semi-decent picture, and the chocolate peppermint flavor certainly tasted good!
The entire family, including Ryan and me, received matching Christmas jammies this year, and these may have been the cutest ones yet!
Turkey joined Ryan and me for our annual game of Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries, and he won by a lot.
Chickadee set up the nativity scene before I filled the stockings and we headed to bed:
We were up very early on Christmas Day, and I finally got pictures of all of the children while they were opening their stockings!
We enjoyed our traditional Christmas Day cherry coffee cake for breakfast:
But that paled in comparison to the beautiful Christmas sunrise…”A holy day has dawned upon us!”
Back at church, the adult choir had the opportunity to sing again, including these two beautiful descants:
Of course I had to get another picture after the service:
After lunch, we opened presents:
The rest of Christmas Day was fairly quiet…we watched Christmas movies, as well as a few episodes of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which the Fab Five received for Christmas.
Yesterday, on Boxing Day, we had our big, fancy Christmas dinner. As always, I had fun setting the table:
This year’s dinner included roast beast (a standing rib roast that I found for a steal at Aldi), mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflower, Jell-O, and croissants, plus a festive Comet and Cupid Cabernet Sauvignon for the adults. I think I cooked the beef extraordinarily well (or maybe good would be better, if not grammatically correct, because it was definitely not well-done!).
We had a trio of Christmas desserts, and I hit pretty much every Christmas flavor except peppermint. There was cranberry-apple bread pudding with a vanilla cream sauce, gingerbread-eggnog trifle, and a chocolate Yule log:
And that’s the end of another Christmas celebration. I’m already thinking about how we can celebrate next year!