Christmas Eve

Jared was sick on Christmas Eve, so he spent most of the day in bed.  The boys and I played in the living room.  I tried to make the day "Christmasy," so we listened to a lot of Christmas music and watched a few Christmas movies.  The favorite by far had the least to do with Christmas.  It was Merry Christmas, Thomas and it was really just a winter themed video.  Basically every episode had snow.  But whatever.  I tried.

Thanks to years of gifts from the Herreras we have a lot of Christmas books, so we also read a lot of Christmas stories.  Having read them throughout the month of December, the kids knew their favorites, so we stuck with the favorites on Christmas Eve.  This was the top book of the month:

followed closely by:

Mortimer's Christmas Manger

About 5 we started our special Christmas Eve activities.  We first had dinner.  It is an Orton tradition to have danish pancakes and little smokies on Christmas Eve.  As Jared was sick and wasn't eating and I have yet to figure out how to make a gluten free aebleskiever, I broke the tradition and made the kids' favorite-- meatloaf.  Luke eats incredibly slowly, and I quickly figured out that if we were going to do everything we had planned we had to start while Luke was still eating.  So we read a few books that we had saved for the night while Luke finished dinner.  Jared came out to join us as the boys were finishing dinner.  He was such a good sport because I only had to look at him to tell how terrible he felt, but he wanted to be with his family on Christmas Eve.

After dinner we sang Christmas carols.  Luke, of course, had to play them on his stereo.  The only problem was that most of our christmas CDs have been scratched or lost over the past few years, so we had pretty slim pickings.  After singing a few primary christmas songs, Jared played others from the internet and we sang along.

Then we went back to the table to make thank-you letters for Santa.  We made pictures instead of cookies.  Afterwards the boys wanted to hang them up where Santa would be sure to find them.  Luke suggested that the ceiling fan strings would be the very best place to hang them.

Micah's picture

Luke's letter

Then we had our Christmas treat!

 Read the Christmas story

and sent the  boys to bed.

Jared looked close to collapse by that point, so he crawled back in bed and I got Christmas presents ready while I watched the all time best Christmas movie ever: The Muppets Christmas Carol.

Luke's presents from Santa:

a bike (still in the box!), Elefun, and a candy fan (in the stocking.)

The ONLY things Luke asked for for Christmas were the elephant game and a candy from Walgreens that has a little airplane with spinning propeller and lights on top.  Good thing Santa came through!

Micah's presents from Santa:

Presents from all the people who love us, ready to be opened the next morning:

Overall I'd say we had a good Christmas Eve, given the circumstances.  I think this was the 4th out of 6 christmases that Jared has been sick.  Poor guy!  Luckily he was feeling quite a bit better the next day.  The boys had a good time, and that's the most important thing!