Christmas Eve and Day 2016

Here's a glimpse at our Christmas Eve and Christmas Day:   

On Christmas Eve we ran errands, did a lot of cleaning around the house, went out to eat at Uncle Julios with AnnaLisa and Tim, then stopped at Barnes and Noble for one last Christmas present.   (no pictures of any of this!) 

After dinner was over we also made our final 12-days delivery--a mailbox filled with letters from people who love them!      

After the delivery was made, we came home and had our Christmas Eve devotional with the Sister missionaries from our ward.   

 They loved having Rocky snuggle time and we loved their beautiful voices joined with ours during all the Christmas songs....

We had little stockings for them....

and them being there made us miss our Sister missionary,  who was spending  Christmas 4000 miles away,  just a tiny bit less.  

Emma is home, which meant that  Christmas morning breakfast was 10 times more amazing than it would have been had it been me in charge.   Homemade English muffins, monkey bread, poached eggs with homemade hollandaise sauce.   Yes, my daughter is quite the chef and it was all delicious!

After breakfast we opened presents, including these gorgeous dishes, which I'm quite excited about!!!!  

 Eventually, this beautiful girl called via FaceTime and we got to talk for about an hour.  The connection wasn't all that great, but it was amazing seeing her face and hearing her stories.   She is working hard and doing a wonderful work there in France.  

We all  really enjoyed our time to talk to her, but we were sure to save her just a little time, so that she also had time to talk to a certain someone who lives far away.   Apparently, we are not the only ones who are missing her like crazy!  

Eventually we got our family Christmas pajama photo, with Cami included via picture!  These might be our favorite pajamas ever.   

We eventually went to church (our church is at 1pm) and enjoyed the Christmas service very much.  The music and messages were outstanding and we really liked that Christmas Day was on Sunday this year.  (no pictures)

  And after that, we threw together some food and went to Aunt Evelyn's house for dinner...

The food was great and we very much enjoyed hanging out with cute little kiddos and the adults while we could.

 One of our kids was acting like a bonehead and embarrassing us thoroughly though, so we didn't want to stay too late.  We hit some tacky Christmas lights on the way home.... 

and the kids watched a movie (the BFG) during which I fell sound asleep.   It was sleep I desperately needed.   

Merry Christmas to all!