‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

The morning of the 23^rd I was hurting for family pretty bad. Greg and I hadn't made any party plans with our friends for the holidays so, about 10:30 Wednesday morning we decided we were going to party it up at our house. We invited 3 families over to have a good old fashioned Christmas Eve Party. We had the traditional Soup and Breadsticks. I made some Chicken Noodle Soup (it actually was horrible, because I timed it wrong, so by the time everyone was ready to eat my noodles were mush!) Luckily there were a couple other soups there to save the day. Everyone pitched in to help make it a great night.
We started off eating then let the kids play for a while before starting our program.

For our Christmas Program we tried to put in some of everyone's holiday traditions. The Denney's have a tradition of doing a reading of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas." I asked our friends, Matt and Alisha Lindsey, to do the honors. I think they thought I was a little crazy, but they were good sports and did an awesome job.

The Owen Family then hosted a white elephant exchange, including the traditional "Wright Family" passing game. I was glad this was one of their traditions because it was one of ours too! I was surprised at the boldness of my kids to get what they wanted. Tanner and Bryn had to steal their items from adults, not something I expected of them. Bryn ended up with a Hello Kitty Notepad and Tanner was the proud (very proud) owner of hand sanitizer. Funny kid, you would have thought he'd just been given $100. Kade was hilarious as the gifts were being passed from left to right; he thought it was the funnest game ever. I was worried he wouldn't want to give his gift up, but he played along with a huge smile on his face.


After the white elephant exchange all the kiddos opened their Christmas PJ's. So fun to have to have 13 kids running around in nice, cozy jammies as the excitement of Christmas was building.

 {And here is Tanner again showing off his hand sanitizer}

The kids played some more games as the party started winding down.

After everyone left it was time to set everything out for Santa and his reindeer.

Greg took care of sprinkling the reindeer food because (drum roll please) it was snowing!

The night ended soon after that. What a fun, busy way to spend Christmas Eve. We definitely missed our family in Utah (and Washington) but we are blessed to have good friends in Arkansas to help fill in the gaps.