Christmas Eve!

Every year we spend Christmas Eve at my Grandma Shirley's house. We visit, we eat, we open presents, and we have the family talent show. Well this year my aunt Lynn bought some special plastic tubes that make a noise (musical note) when you whack it against something... she started out the talent show by passing out the tubes not telling us what was going on (note: this is how she tricked my grandma into participating) then she set up the color coded music on her handy music stand and we went for it...needless to say it was hilarious as you can see from the photo above we are quite the talented family, especially my Dad and I.


Last year I started a talent show tradition for myself by sharing a family history story and also sharing what I learned about how they celebrate Christmas in Norway (where the ancestors in the story came from) so this year I decided to share about another family of our ancestors and share how they celebrate Christmas in Sweden. According to my research they decorate their trees with their flag and also with wooden hearts (to show that everyone is lovable at Christmas) so here I am with the flags and wooden hearts that I made one of each for each member of our family (it's really only 11 since I only made one for each couple).

Last we open presents. We started a tradition a few years ago that all of the adult participate in a gift exchange where we each purchase a present for 25 dollars, rap it and bring it to Christmas eve dinner. Then after "the kids", which now only consist of my 2 cousins, open their presents (here's my family waiting for the adult portion of the evening to begin...Callie looks especially bored because it's her first year being an adult and not getting presents from everyone) then we go into the living room and everyone draws a number...then we go in order from 1 to ? you can either pick a gift from the middle or steal from someone else. It's always a good time and we've gotten pretty good at picking things that anyone would like!