Here's Maryn and Luke at their piano recital. They played two duets together and sounded great!
Daron's parents came and spent Christmas with us which was so much fun. On Christmas Eve we went to Daron's sister's house. They have a tradition of spreading pine cones with peanut butter and bird seed each Christmas Eve and then hanging them up for the birds to eat
His sister did "Christmas Around the World" for her Christmas Eve dinner and had food from all over - Japan, Turkey, Africa, South America, Sweden, Greece! She had spent days cooking and it was delicious!
We then acted out the nativity with costumes my mom had given us. They were a big hit! We had wanted Bronwyn and Ian to be Maryn and Joseph, but she insisted on being a cow and he wanted to be a shepherd.
Then we came back home to open our Christmas Eve pajamas.
Christmas morning came before we knew it!
The kids had fun opening the African gifts my parents had sent from Rwanda.
One thing that made this Christmas the best ever was our new tradition of homemade gifts. This is something we carried over from Daron's family where each person will make one homemade gift. It rotates each year. The kids really got into the spirit of things and made more than their allotted one homemade gift. Maryn made candy necklaces for everyone which Ian polished off in 5 minutes flat. She also sewed neck warmers filled with rice for grandma and grandpa.
The fun thing about the homemade gifts is that the kids come up with their ideas all on their own. If they need help putting it together we'll help them a bit, but it's almost entirely their brain child. Gabe had Daron's name this year. He made him a Christmas ornament and a brief case.
Luke had Gabe's name and made him a fort and a coloring book. He went online and printed Gabe 40 coloring pages and put them in a notebook with colored pencils and a pencil sharpener. Gabe loves to color and asks me every day to print him off at least one coloring page to work on so he was pretty excited.
Maryn had my name and gave me something I had been wanting, a coat rack! It was so clever the way she did it with plastic cups to hang the coats and snow pants on. She also wrapped it in a fun way!
Mom made a hat hanger for Luke to hang his baseball caps on.
Dad made Maryn earrings. He
We will definitely continue making the homemade gifts each year. This is the first Christmas they were much more excited to give than to get. We saved the homemade gifts to open last and the kids kept begging to let the person they made for open their gift. They couldn't wait to see the person's face when they saw the gift they had worked so hard on. It really was a magical Christmas.
