Christmas Eve!

We went to mass at 5:30 Christmas Eve instead of trying to rush out the door this morning. It was a beautiful service and our priest read a letter from Santa, which I thought was incredibly sweet. Here's my pretty girl on the way to church. Napless Bree fell asleep on the way, but it was one of those magic ten minute naps that helped her make it through the service and some marginally successful Christmas-light hunting afterward.

This is pretty typical. I believe we saw this exact scenario at Halloween. What's funny here is that Carly is directing her dad on how to light the fireplace. =)

Then Paul saw Bree and told her Santa doesn't bring presents to pouty girls...and MAGICALLY Bree was happy again. It's a Christmas miracle!

Snuggling with Daddy before bed. We laid out cookies and milk and an apple for the reindeer. Just so you know, Rudolph has retired from flying and is now a reindeer teacher. That fact arose during a conversation about how old the Rudolph movie is and whether or not Rudolph is, in fact, real. Paul had some quick thinking, and fortunately our logical girl thought his explanation made perfect sense.

We did have our traditional Feast of a Bunch of Fishes, but we didn't make it through all seven courses this year. We had smoked salmon tea sandwiches on pumpernickel, fried calamari, linguine with clam sauce cooked with anchovies and crab cakes...we didn't make it to the shrimp or the flounder this year. Does that still count? Maybe? Haha - either way we got our National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation watching in and it was fabulous. We found it much more difficult to go to sleep because of excitement than the girls did...I will hold to my theory that Christmas as a parent is EVEN better than Christmas as a kid. =)