Christmas Eve

On Monday we decided to make our traditional Christmas sugar cookies. I kind of put it off because it's so messy and takes forever, but I remember loving this tradition as a kid and Chase loves it too. Chase loves to help with every aspect of the process- and eats copious amounts of cookies dough along the way as well. 

 We frosted them for family home evening that night. Chase was cracking us all up by using "double shakers" for the sprinkles. This kid LOVES sprinkles and drowned each cookie in them! When we were done I stuck two cookies in the freezer to be Santa's cookies- knowing with all the family we have home now that they surely wouldn't last until Christmas Eve. I was glad because when I told Chase on Christmas Eve that we needed to go set out cookies and milk for Santa, he looked at me with a panicked face and said, "But Mom! I ate the last of the cookies!" I reassured him that it was okay because I had stashed a few in the freezer, and he quickly replied with, "Oh, but mom? Can I just have one of those first?"

 Christmas Eve is my wonderful mom's birthday and we always spend the whole day as a family. After a fun birthday breakfast, my brothers and I started working on our Christmas gift to my dad. A few weeks ago I mentioned to my dad that this year instead of buying him gifts (he rarely wants "things") that we would like to do some act of service for him instead. Since being Bishop he's been so busy that many of his projects have been put on the back burner. He quickly told me that would be a great idea and that what he'd really like is for us to clean up his shop (it's roughly the size of our first apartment and gets very dirty/cluttered). My brothers and I spent 4 hours working on it and can happily report we did it with no fighting and very little swearing :)  My parents took the boys and Nora to visit my grandparents for the morning so they were out of our hair.

After naps we headed to Christmas Village in Ogden! This place is so cute and magical at Christmas. We've taken Chase the last three years and each year he loves it more and more. We planned on going last week, but Hudson got the flu. We all went together (sans Nate who had a headache) and enjoyed the pretty lights and cute Christmas houses, but mostly enjoyed watching my cute boys take it all in. Chase ran from between houses and thoroughly inspected each one looking for trains, fire engines, nutcrackers and penguins (some of his favorite Christmas things). He wanted to look in all the windows and had a huge smile on his face the whole time. Hudson moved through them much more quickly, mostly just looking for houses with trains. My favorite moment of the whole night was when Hudson asked to hold Chase's hand and they walked like that for a few minutes!

 We came home for our traditional candlelight dinner, which was delicious and beautiful. We had birthday cake (imported from Vienna, because we are fancy like that) and then did the Nativity story with finger puppets (Hudson had gone to bed by then- poor kid was exhausted). Chase wanted to be like half the puppets, but allowed Nora to have a sheep, which she chewed on. We watched Prep and Landing and then got our Chaser to bed. I had all these grand plans of us all getting a great nights sleep so that we'd be well rested to enjoy our Christmas morning- but that was not in the plans! Christmas morning held more surprises for us...