Joyeux Noel!!

I don’t know why I can’t ever post when events are still recent, but oh well. We had a nice dinner with Nate’s family before we left for Oregon to spend Christmas with my family. We spent a lot of the break relaxing – reading, napping, playing Wii, shopping, playing games, etc. My family has a lot of Christmas traditions so it is always fun to be home and celebrate those together. It was nice to be able to spend some more time with my little sister too (who got back from her mission a couple weeks before Christmas) and with the rest of the family. Some highlights of the trip (I’ll insert pictures along the way so it doesn’t look like I wrote too much :):

* the “dollar store party” on Christmas eve, which is my sister’s birthday. Mom gets little games from the dollar store and there is a prize (also from the dollar store) for the winner of each game. It’s always quite entertaining.

 

* playing the pipes, acting out the Nativity, and eating a yummy dinner Christmas Eve night. We also have a book that we get to open on Christmas Eve – they are wrapped and my dad hides them in the living room and we each have to find ours. It’s amazing how long it still takes us to find them after all these years, since they’re confined to one not-too-big room. When we were little, we had a hard time falling asleep because we were so excited, so we could read our new books until we fell asleep.

   

   (Nate is the donkey. I don’t know if other families have donkeys in their nativities, but that is always a very important character in ours :)

* everyone dragging their mattresses out to the family room to sleep on Christmas Eve. Our grand entrance to see the gifts the next morning was somewhat halted by Landon getting hit by a french door that was opening and Davis tripping over nothing really and falling in the middle of the floor. It was pretty funny.

* watching Bennett get so excited about his new gifts. He just couldn’t decide what to play with first – so many fun toys, and all the wrapping paper / boxes

* talking to Nate’s brother Spencer, who’s serving in the Carlsbad California mission.

* we rented cross-country skies one day and went up to a trail in the mountains, which was really fun. We got a pretty good workout, but struggled a little on the big downhill parts. It was pretty funny to watch everyone fall down at the same parts – much harder to control the cross-country skies than downhill skies. The weather was great for us though, and it was really pretty and quiet up there. Definitely something we’ll have to do again.

* Spending one (or at least part of one) day with the WHOLE family in Portland (it had been 2 years since we’d all been together). Thanks to a snowstorm in Portland on our way there from Ashland, it took us 5+ hours to drive a distance that normally takes 30-40 minutes, and as a result we lost some of the already-little time we had to hang out with Jake and Stacey. We were just glad we got to see them though – we all went bowling the next day before we had to fly back, and I think we all learned that getting a high score in Wii bowling doesn’t necessarily translate to a good score in real bowling :)

OK, that’s probably enough writing. Here’s the requisite post-church picture (Bennett was taking a nap, which is why he’s missing from the picture. We didn’t disown him. And the 2nd picture was testing the tripod / self-timer).

and one of our cute little reindeer (it looks like he learned how to wave…he really didn’t :) I think he was reaching towards the camera)