Christmas 2011

Christmas Day, 2011

This year my side of the [Michigan] family came to our house for our Christmas get-together.

My niece Emily with my Little Orphan Annie reborn.

After the family get-together was over, we did our family gifts.




The older two kids had a "Christmas Shoppe" at school, so we gave them each a few dollars to spend. They got gifts for each other, Peter, Daddy, and me.

Benjamin's gifts:

Anna's gifts (she also had a couple hand-made ornaments)

We let Peter pick a gift from the Dollar Store for Anna and one for Benjamin:

My "stocking stuffers" to Jason

Christmas this year was almost entirely "brought to us by" Toys For Tots. I was very very grateful that we qualified, even though the wait to pick out gifts was a couple hours long!

Even though we don't believe in Santa, we got a "Santa" hat from the dollar store. We created a new tradition: Whomever is giving the gifts gets to wear the hat. It was fun to take turns giving gifts and wearing the hat! Peter absolutely LOVED it when it was his turn to wear the hat!

Christmas Eve 2011

This year, I had the kids color, decorate, and create Christmas ornaments of their favorite characters (Benjamin=Spiderman, Anna=Cinderella, Peter=Lightning McQueen) for their grandparents' gifts.

Here are the kids (12-23-11) in the process of creating:

For Christmas Eve, we had Grandpa Orange come over.

(One of the suggestions we gave Grandpa was a plush Lighting that Peter would be able to sleep with. Peter absolutely LOVES it!)

It has become our tradition to give out the stockings on Christmas Eve, just before bed.

Daddy even had a stocking stuffer for me. I had one for Daddy, but I made him wait until Christmas because if he saw it, he would know where I got his main gift from, and it would ruin the surprise. ;)