Christmas 2009!

Well, this Christmas was SO awesome for so many reasons but first of all, I want to highlight one of them, and that is, that all my sisters came this year! That was the best Christmas present I could have received, no doubt.

My sister Allison and her baby Evie were able to come for an entire month! It was so great! So, of course we had to do a Christmas bake-a-thon... which was an ever-constant stream of baking over the whole entire Christmas break. We had SO many Christmas goodies. They all were so good. Some of the best ones for me were homemade danish butter cookies, which were SOOOO good. I wanted to do this (and I did):







We made tons of baked goods of all kinds. We also made figgy pudding, because we wanted to make all the kinds of goodies associated with Christmas that we could think of. So figgy pudding came up and we said, "hey, we've never had figgy pudding. What is figgy pudding? Let's try it!" We should have known it was an ill-fated idea when we couldn't even find the figs at the grocery store. It took us about an HOUR to cut them all up into tiny pieces. They were so sticky. These are the figs, before we cut:



Allison stirred feverishly to whip up the egg whites by hand! It can be done! She is SO Martha (minus the criminal history).



The prep work took forever and we were proud to pop that baby in the oven and await our delicious figgy pudding.



It smelled so good when it was baking. (All three hours of bake time...Our second clue that figgy pudding wasn't all it was cracked up to be... any kind of cake that takes three hours probably isn't going to be light and fluffy). And then we finally got to taste it! And?????? And actually now we wonder why there's a song about it because it was really quite nasty. It's more of a fruitcake than an actual pudding, and it was YUCK! Oh well, we now know we can cross that off the bake-a-t(h)on list for next year.


As far as Christmas goes, I always love it, especially when I get to have all my sisters with me and their families. It was a special bonus that Aunt Heidi and Uncle Mark came too. I love to watch Aubrey play with them and love them like I do. It was a huge party every day and there was always somebody laughing and always a baby to play with. The house seemed especially empty after everyone left. And speaking of babies, all those little babies made Andrew jealous. He saw my sweet little nieces, and how they got snuggled when they were nursing and at more than one occasion, he came up to me and looked at me and said, "feed me your milk" to which I had to tell him, sorry, I had no milk to give! It was funny and kind of embarrassing for him to say that to me... but I think it was the snuggly cuddling I think he wanted; he is my snuggly boy, for sure.

So, I'm always the worst at taking pictures on Christmas day, I always get so caught up in watching my kids open presents that when I look back, I only have a few pictures. So, we have them on Christmas Eve with their jammies-- Andrew in Buzz Lightyear to go along with his Toy Story fetish, and Aubrey, in pj pants and shirt with a matching jammie outfit for her favorite doll, Kit. (Poor Kit, little did she know she was going to earn second place forever after this night, when Chrissa would join the family. And poor me, too, I aged about twenty years overnight because Aubrey later informed me that I am Chrissa's grandma.) We had the typical Christmas Eve-- singing songs, reading the Christmas story, and throwing reindeer food so the reaindeer could find their way to our house. Aubrey was more than thrilled to get Chrissa on Christmas Day... and ANdrew was a little overwhelmed with his Cars bed (to go along with his other fetish, Cars).

I think we had shift in ideas for presents this year, It seems like in years past, I was like, "the more presents the better!" But then there's always presents they never play with and more clutter to pick up after. So this year, we pared down the Christmas list quite a bit, and our kids didn't seem to notice. Chrissa and the Cars bed was pretty much what our kids got. We also got a gift that we thought we all could enjoy, a Wii. Aubrey was nervous at first to play the Mario game, but she has proved herself to be quite adept at being Mario, especially using the Jump feature. We know whenever Aubrey is making Mario jump, because the floor shakes because she is bouncing up and down too. She always wants to be Mario because player 1 always gets to control where to go.l Sometimes our games consist solely of wandering around the paths in the different worlds, without even going into a level. She also really likes the bowling game and is good at that too. Andrew likes to push the controller's buttons but doesn't really get what he's doing. I think it has proved to be a good purcahse, and one that helps us play together, something that we all enjoy, rather than something that separates us into playing by ourselves.

I also straightened my hair, something that I hardly ever do, but we realized I look a lot more like my sisters when I do. There were a couple of times that somebody mistook me for Allison from behind. Funny.



We also had the Annual Christmas Sausage Fest, making sausage by hand and using a vintage sausage mill (crank? I don't know what it's called actually, but it is old).
Go, Chad, go, you strong man, you.



Even Andrew got in on the action, his first Sausage Fest ever to participate in.




We also had a visit by a friend of Mom and Dad's from India, Suman, who was passing through on his way to BYU Hawaii. We've heard a lot about Suman and his wife Asha and it was great to meet him in person.

I couldn't get enough of these:





And also these guys... (Suman now included)

The fact that I never had brothers growing up makes it that much more fun now to have four brothers in law that are more like brothers to me in every way. We are lucky in that all the siblings get along and all the brothers in law get along. We all like each other and it makes it so fun when we get together. In fact, they have their own 'brotherhood' and are fairly close with one another also. I love them all.

We also gave an AWESOME Christmas present to my sister Ashley, which was our own live personal interpretation of "New York" by Alicia Keys. An idea by Allison, and brought to pass by everyone's awesome moves and rap skillz (brothers in law included) it was a huge success and everytime I think about it I laugh to myself. It was so fun. We even video'd it so we can watch it whenever we want. It really was brilliant.

There was also a lot of movie-going, card playing, and game playing, including a fun game Aunt Heidi brought of backwards charades, where we got to see Chad and Stevo spooning, surely a higlight for me. Oh man, it was SO awesome. I love Christmas. This past one was SO much fun.