Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas Eve everyone! I hope that all of you are warm and snug around someone you love and will spend the day enjoying the amazing gift of life, given to us by our amazing Jesus.
Santa is coming tonight, and that will be very exciting of course, but even jolly ole' St. Nick's bag of goodies pales in comparison to the gift given the world on the very first Christmas, when God sent his son to redeem all of us. This morning, my heart is feeling very full and grateful for that.

Christmas Eve is a very special day around here. We try hard not to go anywhere, or run any errands on this day or the next. In our family, usually this doesn't happen quite as strictly as we would like (mark my word, someone will have to run to the gas station for milk or something like that) but we get pretty close.

Instead of cooking on Christmas Eve, we lay out appetizers around nooon and graze on them all day long. Years ago, when we had fewer children, we used to cook a big dinner in the evening but what we found over the years, was that doing so made the remaining portion of the night a big rush. We found ourselves hurriedly finishing eating, cleaning up the mess, doing cookies for Santa, reading about the first Christmas, saying prayers, getting kids in pajamas, opening their first present (we always let them open ONE of their gifts before bed on Christmas Eve) and tucking them in. Rushing the kids was taking some of the joy out of the experience. The first year we switched over to appetizers (all day appetizers) we LOVED it. The evenings were full of doing all those aforementioned things with the kids rather than cooking, eating and cleaning. We were able to take our time with all the fun stuff and even watch "A Christmas Story" which has now become tradition as well.
Of course we like to get our 9 kids into bed fairly early because...well...with 9 kids, Santa has a big job that tends to...ahem...take a while and since Mommy and Daddy like to get a little bit of sleep before kids storm the living room at 5 a.m. and excitedly shake up to "WAKE UP, WAKE UP!" we know we'd better get started before late.
So now, I'm going downstairs to get breakfast ready for the kids, and pick up a little bit so we can relax the rest of the day. Kambree is coughing in her bed, I think she was running a fever last night so I hope she won't feel badly today.
I hope all of you have an excellent Christmas Eve and Very Merry Christmas!