Our Christmas celebration....

Happy Birthday, Jesus...

A handful of the kids blowing out a candle on Jesus's birthday cake!

Ever since we were little girls our Christmas celebration has included a birthday cake for the Birthday Babe. Yesterday was no exception..so along w/a slice of pumpkin pie and a plateful of cookies, we sang Happy Birthday and enjoyed a slice of His cake. We remarked that possibly He was smiling down upon us as we sang and celebrated His day...

We didn't take as many pictures as we should have, I thought later how nice it would have been to get a picture of the whole family together!

Great Grandma always enjoys watching the kids open gifts and joining in on the fun....she got a little weepy yesterday when Tammi's family presented her w/a little photo album of the family and kids....Lil was feeling a little under the weather, but popped up from her seat to help "GG" unwrap her gifts!

It was a good day...

Not sure if it was a joke, based on my tp comment on the last blog, or to help offset our grocery bill....but- never to disappoint, each family went home with a little extra tp after the last round of "White Elephant" exchange! That's a SERIOUS amount of paper! Alex (the one who drives the cost of tp up in our house) is sure it'll last forever....I'm convinced only that it'll last til the end of the year.

We hope each of you found joy in your day of celebration as we did. I had a thought throughout the last few days when I was dealing with an unwelcome situation- how easily I can let circumstances around me affect the way I celebrate a holiday...but of all holidays not to let MY circumstances put a damper on...Christmas is it. It dawned on me it's not MY birthday...not MY holiday...so it's certainly not MY place to get disgruntled regarding an unwelcome glitch in my plans. We don't all have ideal, picturesque scenarios to deal with during the holidays. Some things are just unfortunate, painful, or downright uncomfortable. Keeping the Reason we celebrate in mind helps to put everything else in its proper place, though. Sometimes it just comes down to making a choice to celebrate regardless of what else tugs at us to do otherwise.

....so we celebrate....