Christmas Eve Traditions

After weeks of seeing presents sitting under the tree, and not bothering them all that much-I was beginning to wonder if Topher knew what to do with them! Well no worries-Christmas Eve came and he knew exactly what to do.

We have the tradition of opening Christmas jammies on Christmas Eve, but we also have started a little tradition since Bekah was born of a Christmas Eve ornament too. Bekah's first ornament was a little snowman that I painted for her, we decided to keep up with the theme and every year she gets a new snowman ornament to hang on the tree. With Christopher we got him Santa Claus's-which was a good choice since he is obsessed with "Ho Ho Ho" as he calls him. We also started getting some for Zach (nutcrackers) and Ryeliegh (winter activities; like ice skates and sleds) too. The ornaments each have their name and year painted on them and when they leave the house, these are the ornaments that they can take with them.

Chad and I also do an ornament exchange each year on Christmas Eve-but ours don't have a theme exactly. What we do is try to find an ornament that represents something that happened that year, like this year Chad got me a car ornament, since this is the year we bought a new car (actually 2 new cars). I got Chad a lantern ornament because this is the year that Chad got his associates-so we can see that there is a light at the end of this school thing and it's also the year that the lights kind of came on for us as far as financial stuff and goals setting and reaching.

It's been a fun tradition and it's fun to pull out the ornaments from the years previous and remember why we picked those out for eachother.

Since we have moved to Oregon, I have also started the tradition of making each of the kids a little photo book of the summer activities. I send Zach and Ryeleigh's to them with their Christmas presents and that way they have some photo's to show their mom and family in Utah what they did while they were here. I do the one's for Bekah and Topher too, so that if I don't ever get around to scrapping all those photo's they can at least have these little books to look at, not to mention they make great church books!

(In case anyone is wondering...I make them on Snapfish.com and they only cost like $5 each.)