Saturday, January 31, 2009

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Christmas at Home

We had Christmas at home this year. This is the first year that Katelyn has believed in Santa Clause and it made for a really fun Christmas. We packed so much into the Christmas season and it flew by incredibly fast.

On Christmas Eve, we made sugar cookies to decorate for Santa Clause and watched a movie together. Katelyn is an expert cookie decorator and had a lot of fun with the sprinkles.


After dinner, we headed out in the car to see the neighborhood Christmas lights. They are always so beautiful, we love the houses that really go all out with blow-up snowmen, flashing snowflakes and lights covering the entire house. The tackier the better, in my opinion. :) We drove around for about an hour and then Kate was ready to head home. After settling down on the couch, Ben read the Christmas story from the Bible and we watched a video of The First Christmas. It was really beautiful. Katelyn asked to watch it again. She loves seeing the baby Jesus. Right before we headed to bed, Katelyn received a very neat phone call. It was from Santa! He told her that he thought she had been a good girl all year long and that she needed to go to bed so that he could bring her presents. She thought it was so neat! So, we took her right to bed and we read "'Twas the Night Before Christmas".

Once the kids were asleep, Ben and I wrapped gifts until nearly midnight while watching "It's a Wonderful Life" on TV. We set out all of the Christmas gifts under the tree and stuffed the stockings. It was so fun knowing Kate would be seeing it all in a few hours!



Kate and Josh woke up around 7:30 am on Christmas morning and we headed downstairs to see if Santa came. He had! Kate was so excited about all of the presents under the tree.



After opening our stockings, we started in on all of the presents. Katelyn played Santa Clause for a little while, handing out gifts to everyone, but then she was too distracted by her own new toys to even open anymore of her own presents. It was sweet. She and Josh received so many wonderful gifts. It was a very generous Christmas.







After the gifts were all opened and Josh was awake, we all got in the car to go over to Grandpa Bellinghausen's house. We had Christmas morning all over again!

It was a truly wonderful Christmas and we were very blessed to be with family.