I love the traditions we have started the past few years- it has been such a fun thing to create these moments and memories. Christmas Eve is a night for just our family. We go to the Christmas Eve service at Orchard, serve together by either passing out candles or in the nursery (this year was candles), hang out around church for awhile & eat Linda Bartlett's yummy food (she always has a room full of food for people serving that night), and then head home to settle in for the night. This year we started our new tradition of Addelyn opening up one gift (her new Christmas pjs) that she could wear to bed. I hope to get this tradition going every year- next year I'll have two sets of pjs to buy! Once we got home, we finished our Advent calendar that we had been doing all of December. It was fun to read through each day again and put the whole Christmas story together. We also read a book we have called the Christmas Story which takes the Bible story and puts it into kids words/pictures. Then we made up a bed on the floor, got our pjs on, and settled in for "movie night" with popcorn and M&Ms and the movie "Despicable Me." It was such a sweet, relaxing, wonderful night together with my family. I laid there on the floor next to Mark & Addelyn (before I passed out twenty minutes into the movie, probably part of the tradition too) and my heart felt full and thankful.
Notice the poking baby belly in our Christmas Eve pic. (I was about 16 weeks in this picture).
This is the unwinding after arriving home from Christmas Eve services. It took awhile to settle down for the night!
Finally she settled (in her new Christmas pjs) and the movie party started. After Addelyn headed off to bed, Mark and I stayed cuddled up for a movie of our own.
Yeah for Christmas Eve traditions & for celebrating what the season is all about!
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