Christmas Eve Fun

We spent Christmas Eve at home getting ready for Christmas Day, and enjoying lots of baking and cooking. Jamie and the kids helped me bake several different things throughout the day. We made more pretzel treats, homemade cat treats (at Hanna’s request), pumpkin pie, gingerbread cookies and sugar cookies. Most of our day was spent in the kitchen:-).

After dinner, we took our yearly drive around two neighborhoods that we save just for Christmas Eve light looking. We love looking at Christmas lights throughout the entire month of December, and have saved our favorites the past 3 years for just this night. It was lots of fun. It was super great because Jack didn’t talk nonstop, and Jesse didn’t cry at all!! Jamie and I couldn’t believe we actually rode in peace and were even able to carry on a conversation most of the time!!

It is a tradition of ours to decorate cookies for Santa each Christmas Eve. Jamie and I put Jack and Jesse to bed, and then he, Hanna, Joe and myself decorated our cookies.

I’m not sure what Joe did more of—decorating the cookies or eating the decorations:-). Either way, he had fun, and that’s what matters most!!

Hanna and I both agreed we liked making snowflake cookies using the white pearled sugar beads the best.

After we finished decorating all of our cookies….

….we put them on our Cookies for Santa plate along with some chocolate milk. Hanna made this plate at The Mad Platter when she was 5, and we’ve used it each year since. I love it—it’s so sweet.

There was one thing left to do—put the food outside for the reindeer. After this, Hanna and Joe went to bed very excited! I’m sure they were both slow to fall asleep.

Jamie and I actually had our “ducks in a row” this year and were able to do nothing but watch a movie together the rest of the night. This was such nice change to the usual. I hope we remember this next year. We both went to bed very excited for Christmas morning.