me & the fam: pre- Christmas..our december (1 of 2)

{playing with the kid friendly Nativity sets- hours were spent doing this in Dec.}

lately, I feel like i need to change the title of my blog to "my life through a blurry lens" since 90% of my blog post i do from my phone with pictures taken with my phone camera. I keep wanting to put up pictures from Christmas, but I won't let myself until I document a little bit of our December...with some of my real pictures. I lost my camera cord for a few weeks in there, plus, it was busy Christmas time, so I never really got to write about some of my favorite happenings at my favorite time of year.

The season started out with a bang on Saturday, Nov. 26th, 2 days after Thanksgiving. Did anyone see the Modern Family last month called "Express Christmas"? They are all sitting around together mid-december when they realize that it's the last time they'll all be together till the New Year. They decide to celebrate that night and spend the day rushing around getting presents, a turkey, and tree, etc. We had something similar to that with the Romney Family. Since we usually celebrate Christmas every other year with Craig's fam and then my fam, this was the off year for the Romney family. A lot of Craig's family was in San diego for Thanksgiving and a few days before Thanksgiving, we realized that all of us wouldn't see Mitt and Ann again till after Christmas. Laurie and Ann hurried and ordered Legos for all the grandsons on Amazon (they had just gone to American Girl doll store with the granddaughters).

Then on Saturday, all the kids came to our house while Laurie hurried and put up her tree and Christmas decorations. I had started making Nativity costumes back in my "Christmas in September"(which, by the way, totally changed the feel of my whole Dec. for the better and which I will be doing every year), but I hadn't planned on having them done until we needed them for the traditional acting out the nativity on Christmas Eve with my family. My family has done this since I was a little kid and it has always entailed rushing around the house grabbing bathrobes, pillow cases, broom sticks and odds and ends out of the costume bin and throwing it all on the kids 5 mins before my dad started the reading of Luke 2. Since Craig's family has the same Christmas Eve tradition of the reading of Luke 2, I thought it would be worthwhile to put together a bin full of actual navtivity costumes that we could use each year, with who's ever family we were with. I just didn't realize that they were going to get double use this Christmas - this worked out perfectly for my boys who each got a chance to play the role of a shepard AND a wiseman this year.

For a starting point in making the costumes, I ordered 5 dress/robe type things and 2 shepards staffs off oriental trading (i did this in sept. I had just gone on the website to get ideas so i could sew them, but at $6 each, it was def. more time/cost effective to buy some). I had started to embellish them, collected some angel wings and sewn a few angel costumes-in sept- but there was still alot to be done. So on "express christmas" day, Chloe, Ann and I set up shop in my sewing room, calling the kids in from the pool one at time and grabbing trim, scarfs, and clothe napkins from around the house to pull it all together. (I used 3 of Heidi's headbands for the wise men crowns). Usually after they got their costume on, they didn't want to take it off, so most of them ended up running around the pool and yard in their costume instead of swimming. it was a pretty funny site.

We eventually worked our way over to Matt and Laurie's house, which was all beautifully decorated (and clean-you should have seen the mess left in the wake at my house...like a tornado had hit)...Laurie and Mitt had wrapped presents and Mitt picked up "christmas dinner" (take -out mexican from Wahoo's;) ) We ate, perform the 5 minute play with Papa narrating from Luke and opened presents. And just like that, we had fully celebrated Christmas on November 26th.