Christmasing with Family

We spent Christmas at home in Baker with my family. Aunt Katy was home too, and we all had a wonderful holiday. 

 Grandpa let Sarah help build the fire. She forgot to let go of the match, and I suddenly heard Dad and Kelson yelling, "drop it now!".  Leave it to the men to hand the 4 year old a lit match. Fortunately no one got burned, and Sarah thought it was very exciting.

 One of our Christmas traditions is making brigadeiros. They are a Brazilian chocolate caramel that you roll in different toppings. Kelson brought out the toppings while Sarah and I were starting to roll the caramels - cocoa powder, chocolate sprinkles, sugar sprinkles, and toasted coconut. I handed Mom a coconut one to try. She tasted it and then made a horrible face. I thought maybe the coconut was bad, so I tasted it and realized that Kelson had brought me a bowl of onion soup mix instead of coconut. Gross. Poor Mom. Chocolate caramel rolled in onion soup is not good. 

 We corrected the topping mistake and Sarah had a great time rolling the rest of the caramels.

On the 22nd, we went to my Uncle Donny's house for Danish Christmas. Don't you just love the gingerbread cookie place cards?

 Chris got stuck behind me, under the Christmas tree. He took advantage of the opportunity to snitch candy canes during dinner. 

 Danish Christmas is one of our favorite traditions. It is a wonderful time to be together with my Mom's family and celebrate our Danish heritage. Sarah entertained herself photographing the party.

 Chris decided that playing under the table was super exciting. He rolled around down there for at least half an hour.

 Katy offered to read Sarah a book, and Sarah came up with a Beauty and the Beast chapter book with no pictures. She settled right in and demanded that Katy start reading. She read for several pages before I intervened and brought a children's book for them to read. Sarah loves her Aunt Katy.

 We took the kids to see the lights at Sam Bass's house. He has wooden cutouts of dozens of cartoon characters and lights all set up throughout his yard for everyone to walk through. I have been going there as long as I can remember. Mr. Bass died this year, so this will be the last time going there. Fortunately someone in the community has offered to take over the display. It was extremely cold the night we went, but the kids loved it. 

 Kelson went for a late night run in the cold to enjoy the festiveness of downtown Baker. 

I will write about Christmas and Christmas Eve in the next post, but we will jump to after Christmas real quick. 

 Mom, Katy, and I got to spend the afternoon shopping at after-Christmas sales and attending the new temple in Meridian. It was such a great day with my two best friends!

We went back to Grandma's for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. I didn't take any pictures for some reason, but we celebrated at Jeremy's house this year. We had a delicious dinner of ribs and shrimp and then spent the evening playing games. We spent the night at Jeremy's so that we could put all of the kids to bed early. We almost made it to midnight, but the baby woke up at 11:45 and broke up the party. The next day, we all played at Grandma's house. The kids have been making great use of the new tea set that Grandma bought for Christmas.