Christmas Memories

Thank you for all the lovely Christmas cards, notes, and emails!  We hope that you and your families had a joyous Christmas.

We celebrated Christmas on Monday, a few days early, in order to have everyone together.  Our daughter and her family arrived at our house in the early afternoon, and our son and his family arrived around dinner time.  Tom cooked our turkey on the grill, and it was yummy.  Instead of our traditional fixings, we varied things this year and had roasted brussel sprouts, corn pudding, and chutney along with our usual dressing and gravy.  Another new addition this year was sticky toffee pudding.  Boy, was it delicious! 

Here are the boys after dinner, patiently (??) waiting to open packages.

Tom always enjoys handing out the giftss, but in this photo he is opening one.  I think this one is the saffron from Stephen and Michelle.  They had lots of cooking things for him.

Here is Haiden opening a gift from his Aunt Michelle, Uncle Stephen, and cousin Garrett.  I love the expression on his face.

And here he is with his parents.  (Not a good photo, but the only one I could find with our daughter in it.)

I love this photo of Garrett with Michelle.

Haiden was particularly excited when he saw what was in the big box.  I surprised the five "boys" with scooters. 

Here is our silly Garrett in the box for his father's scooter.

One of our family traditions is picking up donuts on Christmas Eve to have on Christmas morning.  (It is the only day of the year that we eat donuts for breakfast.)  Tom's father started this tradition with our children, and we are continuing it with our grandchildren.

Garrett hadn't arrived when Tom and Haiden went out to chose the donuts.  I hope that next year Garrett will be able to go with them. 

Then, after eating donuts and baked apples (which I had forgotten to serve the night before for dinner), it was time to play with Legos and scooters. It had been too late the night before to try out the scooters. Although it was very cold outside, we were lucky that most of the snow had melted so the "boys" could all try out their scooters.

First are Haiden and Garrett.

And here are the "big boys", Stephen, Tom, and Greg.  I had hoped to get all 5 guys in one photo, but the little ones wouldn't stand still long enough.

And then, all too soon, everyone was gone, and it was just Tom and me.  We went to Christmas Eve church services, and yesterday had a quiet day at home except for going out for a special Christmas dinner--I didn't want to have leftovers on Christmas Day or fix another big meal.

Our other big news is that Stephen and Michelle have found a house they like.  If all goes as planned, they will be closing on the house in about a month.  These are indeed exciting times for them!  Tom and I are very happy that they will be living about only 10 minutes away from us.