Christmas Eve

We always spend Christmas Eve with my family.  We celebrate Christmas and my sister's birthday (her birthday is Dec. 23).  Many, many years ago my grandmother started having steak and shrimp for Jill's birthday.  My mother has continued that tradition and that's what we have for dinner every Christmas Eve.
I like to get a family picture at Thanksgiving or Christmas. The weather didn't cooperate at Thanksgiving, so before dinner we had to have our annual family photo shoot. It was a great afternoon for pictures and everyone cooperated pretty well.

After dinner, Ashlyn always reads the story of Christ's birth from Luke 2.  This year my mom had a different plan.  Before the Christmas story, we had to sing The Twelve Days of Christmas.  Each person had one or two days they had to sing when the time came.  It was a lot of fun and very comical.  Nate's part was the first day - partridge in a pear tree.  He did a great job but his partridge was in a "bear" tree. 

After the Christmas story we had a great time opening gifts. 

Nate loves my dad, Pops.  They are best buddies.  Nate loves to sit in his boat and play in his tackle box.  My dad always sends him home with fishing worms.  Nate has quite a collection now so my dad thought he needed a tackle box for Christmas.  If you look closely, you'll see a little red box.  Pops also gave him his very first knife.  It's a Swiss Army and Darren and I will, of course, only allow him to use it with supervision.  Darren's dad gave him a BB gun last year, so I guess it was time for him to have a knife.

More worms for his collection.  Looks like he and Darren and Pops will be doing lots of fishing this spring.

Finally, we ended the night with Happy Birthday to Jill.  Ashlyn likes to make Jill's birthday cake from scratch.  She also wanted to try using fondant icing for the first time.  I volunteered to help her with the cake.  I have never worked with fondant and thought it would be fun.  She got here around noon on Friday and didn't leave until around 4:30.  Almost that entire time we were working on the cake - either baking it, making icing, frosting, working with the fondant, decorating, etc.  It was a comedy of errors.  Almost everything that could go wrong went wrong, but we laughed our way through it and ended up with a pretty cute cake.  For the record, it wasn't supposed to be orange.  That was just one of the many bumps in our cake making road. :)