Counting Blessings: Christmas Eve

Today's Blessing:  An Unhappened Event, Christmas Eve Elves, and Little Kids!!

Tiffany and Jeremy really wanted Scott and I to meet his parents, so they asked if we could all get together for breakfast this morning.  Originally I was scheduled to work, but my boss is pretty awesome in that she is so flexible with my schedule!  She didn't even hesitate saying I could have the day off.

Well, the breakfast plans never panned out but it was probably a good thing.  Tiffany and Jeremy had been driving straight for perhaps 24 hours with very little sleep during that time in order to pick up his two little girls in Washington.  As you can imagine, they were pretty tired when they got back home, so Jeremy's parents took Eliza and Allie for a few hours and Tiffany and Jeremy got some much needed sleep!  That was a blessing for them!

Tiffany was all apologetic that the breakfast plan fell through, but perhaps it was a blessing for me too.  I had three Christmas stockings still to finish along with food to prepare and gifts still to wrap.  Having the day off work really helped me out!!  So that "unhappened" event was a blessing for me too!

I finished three cute stockings for my three grand-daughters...Eliza, Allie, and Alexis...thanks to Scott too who was wonderful and braved Walmart for me to buy some new puff paints.  While I worked on stockings, Cody started preparing our Christmas Eve feast and then in the afternoon Aly Vanderdoes came over and helped too!  It was so awesome having a couple of elves in the house!!

 

At 6:00 pm we had a full house.  Grandma Dean, Bibs, Grandma and Grandpa Maw, Tiffany, Jeremy, Eliza, Allie, Cody, Scott and I were the Christmas Eve gang tonight.  We ate turkey, ham, sweet potato casserole, regular potato casserole, rolls, veggies, fruit and dip.  Then we all gathered in the front room for our advent wreath and the Christmas Story.  How fun!  It's been years since we've had little kids for Christmas Eve.  Eliza was our little performer...she acted out the Christmas Story with my Fisher Price Nativity Set and when we sang songs she did sign language to "O Come All Ye Faithful".  She was sooo cute!

Then we gave Eliza and Allie their stockings and they both got to open the gifts we had put inside.  Our family stockings are big so they can include "favorites" like cereal, candy, etc. with a couple of small toys.  Allie was so cute!  Especially when she opened up a box of Trix and said, "I Love This!" and gave it a big hug!  Tiffany and Jeremy had brought some gingerbread men kits for the girls to decorate so we got to have fun doing that too...even Cody!  Aww, what fun!

After everyone left, Scott, Cody and I cleaned up the mess and then unwrapped our family game (I try to buy a new one every year).  This year it is a quick playing dice game named Tenzi!  It was perfect!  The night was already late and we were tired but we fit in a few quick games before heading to bed!

Tenzi!! :)

Four red candles burning

And one white candle all to say

Tomorrow we celebrate

Jesus' birthday!!