Lydia was up by 6:55 am, racing around the house in frustration that no one else was awake. We finally got everyone to the tree by 8:30ish am, and we zoomed in Tom and Suzanne and Alexa’d in my mom for the gift opening. I prepared the kids this year for a scaled down Christmas, but I always get sucked in by Black Friday sales and, well…it wasn’t the scaled-down event they’d been prepped for. Instead, there were so many presents that the kids needed pep talks to make it through the final push of the pile. They just wanted to play with the toys they’d already opened so we had to cheer them on to the end.
Though I did feel appropriate amounts of guilt and shame for this exercise in material consumption, I will say the kids spent the rest of the day playing with their gifts. I had to beg them to watch Klaus with me while I was cooking dinner and, after Ammon and Clarissa were asleep, The Call of the Wild (which was sooooooo good!). Left to their own devices, they just wanted to play with everything all day. And that’s part of the goal, so yay! (The other part is that gifts are my love language, and few things bring me more joy than giving my children gifts. I loooooove birthdays and Christmas mainly because giving them gifts makes me unreasonably happy.) Here are two videos of the kids opening presents:
We actually didn’t take a ton of pictures, probably because it was such madness during gift opening and then afterward I was asleep for a long time. We did karaoke as a family in the afternoon, and I finally started moving productively again in the evening, when I cooked a beef tenderloin with a red wine sauce, a lemon-parmesan-artichoke-kale salad, popovers, and a citrus salad for dinner. After clean-up, I worked out, showered, Alexa’d with my mom, played dolls with Abe and Clarissa, and watched The Call of the Wild cuddling with the girls and Abe on the couch.
I have to say that as much thought and preparation as I put into this holiday, I might have been outdone by Lydia’s own preparations. She sewed seriously amazing pillows, stuffed animals, and slippers for everyone in the family and also filled out the sweetest book about things she loves about her dad.
She spent a lot of Christmas day studiously devouring a fact book my mom gave her, and at dinner whenever it was her turn to speak she spouted off new fascinating facts she had learned. She explained that at school the other kids all know more interesting facts than she does, so she is cramming so she can keep up.
Mary and Ammon also put in their own fair share of effort preparing beautiful pictures, cards, and even pillows and stuffed animals for people. Lydia taught Ammon how to sew and he sewed a stuffed mouse for one of his siblings!!! I couldn’t believe my eyes.
This was a very merry Christmas, and one that I hope stays in memory forever. I feel so lucky to be going through life with my favorite people in the world, and celebrating holidays together is one of my very favorite things. Merry Christmas!