Christmas Time Is Here...

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas with your family and friends!  Christmas this year was very relaxed and laid-back for us.  On Christmas Eve, we had a Christmas Eve candlelight service at our church.  We decided to do a small reenactment of the first Christmas and dress up as Mary and Joseph.  That was nice.  I even managed to sew myself a sort of a rough costume. 

I made cookies all morning and we had a nice time of fellowship after the service in the late evening. 

 

 

 

On Christmas Day, we woke up to a little bit of snow!  It was perfect weather; crisp and chilly and just enough snow to look pretty.  After having family devotions, Dan made a delicious breakfast of eggs, sausage, and French toast for us while Gwendolyn drank her morning bottle of milk.  After cleaning the breakfast dishes away, we read the Christmas account in Luke 2, and then Gwen opened her present.   

 

Actually, a family in the church gave her this present.  She loved chewing on the wrapping paper.

 

This bear makes all kinds of noises and sings songs.  She likes it a lot, but we mostly keep it on the silent mode. 

 

Then Dan and I took turns opening our presents to each other. 

 

Dan is the hardest person to get presents for.  I mostly got him work things; goggles, gloves, some ammo, soap.  Very simple things.  We happened to be walking thru an antique store the other day and he saw some book-ends that were a yellow taxi cab that he really liked.  So I went back to the store later and got them for him.  He was really surprised. 

 

 

 

Dan surprised me with two new Christmas houses for my house collection.  One is a church and the other is a firehouse.  He also got me the little pewter people too. 

 

I loved the gifts he picked out for me. 

 

Once we finished cleaning up the wrapping paper and putting away our new gifts, we took some Christmas Day photos outside. 

 

 

 

After we ate a little lunch, Dan was really wanting to go to the house in town and build me a stable for our nativity scene.  I've been wanting to make myself one since we first decorated for Christmas, but Dan knew that if I made it, it wouldn't look much like a stable probably.  😀😀😀

So we went together to the house.  I lit a fire in the furnace downstairs while Dan started in on the stable-building. 

 

 

 

 

 

Gwendolyn was so content the whole time, as long as she could be in the same room with us. 

 

The finished product.

 

I like how it turned out. 

 

Then, due to my insisting, we played monopoly.  Dan won, like he usually does.  Dan found a way to hold Gwen without her being able to grab the monopoly board and pull it off the table. 

 

Oh, and I think I forgot to make a post about this, but Gwendolyn is going to be a big sister in May! She was very excited when we told her.

 

 

It was a wonderful Christmas.  Right before bedtime, Gwendolyn spent some down time with me, just thinking about what a great day we'd had. 

 

 

This was the first Christmas we've spent with just us-our little family.  It was very nice.  We enjoyed creating memories together and deciding what our family traditions will be like. 

Hope all of you had an equally wonderful time with your families.

Happy New Year!