Christmas Eve

We began the day with church, it being Sunday.  We only met for sacrament meeting, but it was a lovely Christmas program filled with music and the Christmas story from the New Testament.  The Primary children sang and both Brandt and Blythe sang nicely.  I watched.  I think Brandt really sang, not just lip-synced.  The ward choir sang two numbers which were also nice.  I know Kent and I both sang.  It was such a nice way to spend Christmas Eve morning and I wish that we could go to church every Christmas or Christmas Eve.  It helps keep the focus of Christmas on Christ.

I took a sneaky picture during church as the children sang.

Don't tell anyone!

Because it was the Sabbath, we didn't have much planned for the day, and we had done all our fun, festive, family activities yesterday.  I did have the children help me wrap presents, Brandt helping with Blythe's and Blythe helping with Brandt's.  Both of them wrapped presents for Kent.  We made cookies for Santa, sort of.  Grandma Dawn had brought us some frozen cookie dough, and our neighbor, Justine Banks, had brought us some little sugar cookies and frosting and sprinkles to decorate them with.  So we baked cookies, then decorated the others.  I assured the children that Santa would love the frosted sugar cookies more than the chocolate chip, as they had done such a cute job decorating, so that's what we put out for Santa.  He did a fine job finishing them off when he stopped at our house.

Brandt has been asking about his birth mom, Jamie.  I had made her a photo book of pictures of Brandt throughout the year, but I hadn't gotten it mailed.  I suggested we drive down to Springville so we could meet her and deliver her book in person.  Brandt thought that was a great idea, so he was able to meet Jamie today.  We certainly surprised her, but in a good way.  We had a nice visit, she and I cried practically the whole time, and Brandt was good about answering questions and being kind.  He is naturally shy and reserved around adults he doesn't know, so he wasn't super talkative.  Jamie was glad to meet him and told us how grateful she was that we stopped by.  I'm sure we'll see her again.

We had Grandma Sue and Richard Ledford join us for dinner.  We played a couple of games after dinner, and after Grandma Sue had helped clean the kitchen and left for the night, we all went for a walk.  The children were squirrelly both from it being Sunday and it being Christmas Eve, and we needed to get out of the house.  It was snowing lightly, all was calm and bright, and the neighborhood was lined with luminaries again.  There was a magical feel in the air, probably because it was Christmas.

Picture taken by random guy who drove into the cul-de-sac looking at the luminaries.

His window was down so I asked him to take our picture.

Kent was embarrassed. 

That's why he looks so short in this picture.

That, or because I'm wearing a really big hat so I look way taller than he is.

It was snowing.

We managed to get the children into bed at a decent hour, finish the bit of wrapping we still needed to do, and get into bed ourselves.  Everything looked ready for the next day.  We just hope the children don't wake up at 3:00am.

These six small cookies were polished off handily.

If the six surrounding them were actual decorated sugar cookies, not part of the plate,

they would have been polished off, too.