Christmas Eve

Birthday festivities were over; it was time to quickly move on to our Christmas Eve celebration! First, a very crowded church service and then over to Gigi and Pop Pop's for our annual Christmas Eve gathering.

Great picture of everyone around Gigi's enormous Christmas tree! It is stunning (and perhaps bigger!) each and every year.

We opened gifts first (much to our children's delight), and Collins was thrilled to receive lots of cool accessories for Winter...

and her very own robot!

  Addie loved her gymnastics mat...

(see the flip??)

and an American Girl doll that had straight hair!

 Luke was pretty impressed with his Broncos pillow pal from Colorado...

but no more than his father was to get a Broncos jersey of their newest draft pick- a State guy! Aunt Connie and Uncle Charlie always know what to get Brian for Christmas.

But the most fun present of the night definitely came for Luke at the end...his very own motorized fire truck!

Luke does not know how to drive any motorized vehicle so Gigi and Pop Pop were very kind to let him loose in their house in that thing. He was running into furniture and walls, but it was a hoot! He LOVED it! His new truck had sirens that wailed and headlights that flashed. He was in heaven.

The gift exchange was awesome, but Brian was probably most excited about the huge hunk of meat waiting to be devoured for his Christmas dinner.

 

We had a super fun night! There was not a quiet moment between the gymnastics, the fire truck, the tasty meal, and the general excitement that comes along every Christmas Eve. 

But how would we ever get these kids into bed and asleep? Luckily, it was a crazy, busy day. It started with a raccoon trap about 4 a.m., continued with a special birthday celebration for our favorite 5-year-old, and ended with a wonderful Christmas dinner celebration. You truly cannot fit more into a day than we did on Christmas Eve. So everyone had little trouble going to sleep that night. We just hoped that Santa's reindeer wouldn't wake us up once we were in bed..."Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!"