Christmas Eve

We had such a wonderful Christmas Eve this year. We had already finished all of our wrapping and prep work for Christmas Day, other than a few food items Shantel wanted to cook to have ready for Christmas morning and take with us to our family's houses. A co-worker gave me a Gingerbread house kit as a Christmas gift, so we did that kit together with the kids and they had a lot of fun.

The kids played outside in the little snow that we had. There were supposed to be several big snowstorms in the days leading up to Christmas but it was still a little bare on Christmas Eve.

Shan's brother, Uncle Jacob came by for a little while and joined us as we read some Christmas stories, sang carols while Lydia played the piano, and hung out together. 

We ate an afternoon snack of summer sausage (Walker tradition) and frappe (Peaden tradition) and laughed at how many traditions we have been able to squeeze together from each of our families this year.

We opened our Christmas Eve present, which was a puzzle of Utah with all of the Utah Temples on it. 

More traditions like: Christmas Eve Pizza (Walker) and Christmas Roll (Peaden)

Thankfully both of our families did some version of the Nativity story on Christmas Eve.

We took some pictures of the kids in front of the tree but I think we will post those in a separate post. 

After the kids were tucked away into bed, we snuggled up on the couch with some hot chocolate and apple cider while watching a Hallmark Christmas movie. Then we filled the stockings and set out the Christmas stuff to be all ready for Christmas morning. 

As a fun addition this year: The kids had specifically requested to be able to lay out their little Christmas stockings, too. We ended up filling them with fruit, cinnamon bread, and a few tiny chocolates and setting them upstairs by their door so that they could eat them in the morning before we went downstairs for Christmas. We only ended up with one banana smashed all over the rug in the boys room, and the kids got a little real food in their tummies and got the excitement of two stockings - so it worked out for us.

Merry Christmas Eve!