Christmas Day

A few pictures from that morning:

Aubrey's new music box A new David Lanz piano book for Abram, since he has mastered "Christmas Eve"
Zacky loves his Cars set

Joel has been dreaming of having a keyboard. Thank you, Costco!

We make the kids stay in bed until 6:30 Christmas morning. It used to be 7:00, but the past few years we have given them a break. As you may remember, we don't do Santa Claus at our house. The kids get plenty of presents, but they all know that Santa is a fun story, and dad and mom work hard to get money to buy their presents because we love them. It is always funny when some well-meaning adult comes up to one of our younger kids (it happened to Savanna today) and asks, "Did Santa come to your house?" Savanna said, "No." She left it at that, and so I quickly explained that we don't do Santa, but we DO do Christmas.

This year we decided to buy a big family gift and go easy on the individual presents. We ordered a pool table on October 17th, and we were told it would be 4-6 weeks until it arrived. Perfect, right?

I called 2 weeks before Christmas to make sure the table was still on schedule. The store checked, and the table hadn't even left Arizona where it was being made. The lady promised me that we would have a pool table for Christmas, even if it meant they gave us the one in their showroom (at least $2000 more expensive than the one we bought) instead. I was OK with that. We would have the table for Christmas.

And then it snowed. The pool store is right by the dental office, and they, too were socked in with snow. Their delivery truck was buried by snow, and they weren't able to dig out until after Christmas. So we wrapped up the brochure and Mark started the gift opening with this story:

"One year there was a really big storm at Christmas (making windy, stormy sound effects, and wearing his Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer jammies I made for him a few years ago). Everyone was worried because they were not going to have presents for Christmas. The UPS truck wouldn't come with the presents. The FedEx truck wouldn't come with presents. The Post Office wouldn't deliver any presents. And the people said, "Don't worry, Rudolph will save us!" And then they remembered, "Oh, no! Rudolph is fake! He can't help us!" But don't worry. This is going to be the best Christmas ever. Some people got presents yesterday (the oldest 3 got new beds which were delivered Christmas Eve), some people will get presents today, and some people will get presents the day after Christmas, and the day after that!"

With that setup, the kids opened the envelope, and they were excited. We then dug into the rest of the gifts, and only Noah was missing one thing we had ordered for him. But he was OK, because he had walkie talkies.

Each kid got a few cool things, and then my mom and dad saved the pool-table-less day by giving the kids a wii. They were amazed and excited. The wii has been a great thing to have during this Christmas break. Each day the kids get up, do their practicing, clean their rooms, and do their chores so that when they ask if they can play the wii, and I ask "Do you have all of your jobs done?" they can say YES and get going.

Kung Fu Panda is an excellent 4-player wii game, by the way. And Savanna is the best bowler around.