Christmas Morning at Home

Cinnamon rolls – Alex has now recognized this is our tradition, and it’s not Christmas morning without these!  We’ve done canned cinnamon rolls, homemade cinnamon roll bread, and now we’ve moved on to amazingly good homemade cinnamon rolls.  It’s definitely a tradition that will be sticking around!

The other part of this tradition is sticking a candle in the cinnamon rolls & singing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus!  We do open presents first…but we don’t play with presents or do anything else until we’ve sung Happy Birthday!  (We went to church on Christmas Eve, and all month long we read the “Jesus Storybook Bible” advent plan, finishing it up on Christmas Eve before putting the kids to bed.)

We have an every day rule that kids may not get up for the day until 7 AM.  That rule still applies on Christmas day, but we had two little boys read to go at 7 AM.  We had to wake Jensyn, our sleepyhead, and give her a few minutes to realize that CHRISTMAS was worth being roused from her cozy, warm bed!

Peeking at what’s under the tree.  Santa doesn’t wrap, and one of Jensyn’s presents from Mom & Dad wasn’t wrapped because it was too big to easily wrap.  (It was a gently used Klip Klop Stable that I purchased from a friend whose daughters had outgrown it.)  So that was their first stop…checking out the unwrapped gifts.

  

moving along to stockings…

Stockings were pretty simple – a small coloring book/dot-to-dot book, a candy cane of Hershey’s candies, a regular candy cane, some character band-aids, and either a book (Jensyn) or a TMNT coloring set with markers (both boys).  I think stockings were under $10/child.

And now opening the wrapped presents from Mom & Dad


As usual, each child got 3 gifts from us.  This year, we limited gifts to about $30/child total.
(Thank goodness for GREAT sales & for buying gently used toys!)
Max: K’Nex, Switch & Go Dino, and TMNT t-shirt
Alex: Batman Lego set, Bumblebee transformer, and TMNT t-shirt
Jensyn – Klip Klop Stable, new Sofia dress, and TMNT pink t-shirt

It was after this that the kids started to realize they hadn’t spotted their Santa gifts yet.  Then the boys discovered a Wii U hiding in the corner!  (How did I not get a picture of this?!  Our Wii died in early December, so the boys were THRILLED to have this!  It was their biggest Christmas wish!) 

Jensyn finally looked up and saw the beautiful, pink, handmade tablecloth playhouse over the kitchen table!  If you can’t tell, she loves it!  All 3 kids play in it, and it’s a great place for lots of imaginative play!  (My friend Erin made this…I’ll have to post more pictures sometime, but it was a labor of love that included my mom & sister helping me select fabrics and use a ZILLION coupons at the fabric store & then a lot of hard work by Erin to make this into a reality!)

Daddy opening his gift from the kids…
and the Christmas aftermath - crazy wrapping paper & toy mess!