Christmas 2010

Every year the Johnson family gets together on Christmas Eve. Grandpa Johnson reads the nativity story out of the Bible while the kids and whoever else wants to act it out. The kids always wear old robes and old dance costumes that belonged to all Grandma's kids. The kids LOVE it and we all love watching them.
This year we had LOTS of beautiful angles, one shepherd, baby Maylee was our "elf" baby Jesus and Rod was the donkey.
Bryce was the lone king and even came with real gifts. Tre and Maddie had to check those out :)
Hadley wasn't too interested in taking part. She was too busy crawling all over the floor being goofy.
After we were done at Grandma and Grandpa Johnson's house we went over to Steve's parents house to open our Christmas Eve presents. This year Sherisse had made all the kids pj bottoms, they were SOOO cute, even the babies got some.
Austin looked SUPER cute with his BIG smiles. This was the best smile I could get from Hadley, she's sooo funny.
Here are the kids on Christmas morning. They had just read their letter from Santa and were waiting to find all their presents downstairs. Austin was still asleep at this point. We normally video the kids opening their presents every year but this year I didn't press record after getting it all set up, whoops! I realised half way through so at least we got some of it. We didn't get any pictures either, whoops again :( The kids had a FANTASTIC Christmas and once again got WAY too many presents. One thing we did this year though was go through all the kids toys and had them take out a bunch of them to give away. We wanted to give them away before Christmas but we never got round to it. I think this will become a tradition now because our kids have SOOO much and I think knowing their toys were going to go to someone who didn't have any made them happy and more willing to give them away. We really tried to remind our kids this year why we have Christmas and kept trying to remind them throughout the whole day. We spent the whole day with Steve's family and had a WONDERFUL time. I do miss my Mom's Christmas dinner but spending the day with Steve's family is great and we always try and add some of my families traditions like prawn cocktail and crackers.
Christmas is such an AMAZING time of the year. I'm so thankful we get to celebrate our Saviour's birth and remember how LUCKY we are to have the gospel in our lives.