Christmas Eve

Last night we celebrated Christmas Eve with Rick's sister and her family. We always have such a fun time with Milton, Julie, Tom and Angela. We ate our traditional Mexican dinner of enchiladas, salsa, chicken fajitas and tacos. We watched "Christmas Vacation" and the kids opened gifts. At the end of the night Dawson, Eli and Brynne threw out reindeer food for the reindeer.

Eli has been arguing with me for weeks that it always snows on Christmas. Well, we live in Oklahoma, so that actually never happens. But, guess what ....


Eli was so excited he couldn't stand it! He drug each of us in rotation to the front door to look at the snow drifts about ten different times throughout the night.

Then it was time for bed and for Brynne to do what she had promised ... to give her "keys" away to Santa. She collected all of them and put them in a gift bag.


Then she wrote a note to Santa.


When the reality of the situation hit, she started crying. I wanted to give in so bad, but decided to press on. Her and Eli slept in Dawson's room with him, like they do on most weekends and especially on Christmas Eve. When we went up to check on them before we turned in, Brynne was sleeping on the floor with Dawson. (She made it all night and was so excited this morning when she got up and saw that Santa left her the orange kitty she had asked for if she gave up her keys.)


Rick and I did our traditional gift-wrap-a-thon after the kids went to bed, and we turned in around midnight.