Two days of Christmas

Christmas Eve!

  My father in law has a tradition every year he sends us a honey baked ham.  That is our Christmas Eve dinner. 

I have started a Christmas Eve tradition a few years ago. We fill up our stockings with gifts and Christmas Eve we open them. This gives us the opportunity for the family to exchange gifts with each other. Christmas morning is all about the gifts that Santa brings. Since Christmas Morning there are some significant gifts for The Cisco Kid we give him little play toys and candy in his stocking.

We got the Cisco Kid into bed at 8:00 p.m. because we had so much wrapping to get done.  We started around 9:30 and we did not finish until 12:30 a.m.

It took the Chief and me three hours to wrap the gifts for The Cisco Kid and a little over an hour for him to open them. All The Cisco Kid asked for this year was an electric guitar and a skateboard. When he got up he searched for the boxes that looked like the guitar and amp. He went right to the guitar and them he went on the hunt for the amp. He spotted a very large box and thought it was the amp. It was his gaming chair instead. The search went on. The amp turned out to be his next pick. That was one happy boy.

After we opened all the gifts, we ate breakfast. I made my traditional Egg Soufflé. I prepared it the day before so all I have to do is put it in the oven and bake it for an hour.

Egg Soufflé link

After a long fun day of playing with all The Cisco Kids new toys we were ready to just relax. In my comatose state I vaguely remember saying goodnight to everyone around 8:00p.m.
This year we had turkey for our Christmas Dinner.   

These Christmas Holiday pewter plates weigh a tone. I have been collecting pewter for about 25 years. I got these plates about fourteen years ago and they came all the way from Mexico.

A girl that worked for me in California went to Mexico regularly to visit her family and one time I asked her if she could bring me back some Pewter plates. I know here in the states pewter plates go for about $40.00 each. I also knew that in Mexico they were much more inexpensive. I gave her $100.00 and asked her to bring back whatever $100.00 would buy. She brought back twelve of these wonderful Christmas Poinsettia plates. I was in shock. Even though I could only use them for Christmas, they are one of my prize pieces.

Enjoying winter break

The Cisco Kid has a total of eighteen days off from school. He had school on Friday Dec 16th but I decided to keep him home so we could do some Christmas shopping for the Chief. After we were done with Christmas shopping we come home and made some hot chocolate and had some delicious cookies. Usually we are running from one activity to the next but now that it is winter break, it gave us some time to just do whatever we want. Some of our days were filled with putting up some train track, Wrapping gifts for family and friends, doing a massive mail out of my Christmas Cookies to family and friends & getting out my Christmas cards. Last week we had a Pack meeting with the Cub Scouts and I suddenly became panicked that I did not start on my Christmas cards. I looked at the Cisco Kid in his Cub Scout uniform and thought....That would be a great Christmas Card Picture! I quickly took his picture in front of our Christmas tree and went to Walgreens pictures on line, ordered the pictures and when we were done with our Cub Scout meeting we went to Walgreens to pick them up. The next day they were all mailed out. The Church The Cisco Kid goes to had a Play called NOEL! They had a live Nativity scene complete with sheep, donkey, chickens, & a lama. I guess the lama took the place of the camel. There was a Choir and a narrator telling the story of the birth of Jesus. After the Play we went to the other end of the Church for the activities. There was a Christmas light show, Hay ride, Cookie decorating, Model building, Pictures with Mickey & Minnie, Cookies and Hot. All of this was free. We enjoyed it so much that I invited one of our friends to go with us again. This time it was Girls and kids night.

Christmas Card Picture.

The Church where we saw the NOEL play and activities. Later that week we went with friends.

Our first visit where The Cisco Kid did his cookie decorating. 

The Cisco Kid and I just love our trains.  We only put them up during Christmas. 

 This year we have several tracks so two engine can run on the tracks at the same time. 

We are half way through the winter break and we have much more fun in store.