The Knutti Family Blog: Christmas!!

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Christmas!!

Still catching up, but I'm getting there!!

Our Christmas celebration was pretty quick. We certainly had a lot of Christmas-themed fun but due to work before and a trip right after, our actual Christmas celebration felt FAST. I ended up working until about 4 or 5pm on the 23rd, so we headed up to Cottonwood the morning of Christmas Eve. We had a fun time relaxing and letting the kids play and getting our enormous haul of wrapped presents incorporated around the tree.

We planned to go out to dinner that night (Wall family tradition that we've happily carried on) and I had chosen a nice steak and seafood place in Cottonwood that I thought I had sufficiently researched as being open on Christmas Eve and good for kids, etc. What I had neglected to ask was if they'd be open for dinner at 3:30 - 4pm. Oops. :) We wanted to go that early because 5 kids 5 and under....and well...early dinner is better. The good news was that there was a sister restaurant just down the street that was open so we just headed down there. Dinner was pretty good from what I remember (ah the hazards of writing about something months after it happened) and then we stopped really quick at the grocery store on our way back to the house.

Kathy (Jacob's sister) wanted to get some ice cream and I wanted to get some eggnog for Jacob (no luck on that one) and a single helium balloon. I feel that the balloon deserves a bit of backstory, so here you are: with Hazel reaching the ripe old age of 5, we wanted to focus more this year on the WHY of Christmas. So we had several FHEs about why we celebrate Christmas, why we give gifts, and what certain symbols mean in conjunction with the nativity story. Well, Hazel really likes to celebrate birthdays. So once it clicked for her that Christmas was to celebrate Jesus' birth, she really ran with it. Eventually she arrived at the decision that she really wanted to mail Jesus a birthday card. I weighed that one in my mind and told her that since we didn't have a specific address, I wasn't sure if good old USPS was going to cut it. Then she got this idea that if we could just get the birthday card high enough, it would be close enough to heaven to count. Here enters the helium balloon. If you decide to brave the video below, you can get a good idea of how that all went down. Here's one spoiler: it's adorable.

We spent more time that night watching some nativity videos and other Christmas movies and playing games with the kids until the adults were tired enough that we finally convinced the kids to let us all get some sleep. In the morning, we discovered Santa had come and hadn't even finished his cookies - naughty Santa. We had lots of funny moments that morning as we opened presents and we did our best to condense them in the video. It was certainly the year of total excitement from Speed. Everything was just AWESOME for him and it was great to watch.

We had our traditional breakfast of biscuits and berries and Kathy made a lovely Christmas dinner that our kids just kept eating and eating and eating. It often surprises people how much my kids will eat when they like something, like ham for example. We had lots of fun playing with new toys, including Jacob's RC helicopter and my new Kindle Paperwhite (LOVE IT) and enjoying being together. I knew we were leaving early the next morning, so I enjoyed relaxing and spending time with my kiddos and extended family. I had some reservations about being gone from our house for Christmas but, as usual, I was just being crazy pregnant lady (here's your public admission, Sarah) we had such a good time and I was really glad we went.

Here's the photo bomb (keep scrolling for the movie):