Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve day our Bishop's family (the Mendenhall's) invited people to come and go for a horse drawn buggy ride.  We invited our neighbor Randy to come with us.  Sometimes he doesn't remember who Jake is, but today he did and he seemed pretty excited to go.  He even put a Santa hat on.

Tamsyn and Savannah Mendenhall

Caren Hahn and Shana Mendenhall

We all wore the Christmas sweaters that Natasha got us.




One with Randy



It had snowed just that morning and down by our house the snow had already melted, so it was fun to see that there was still snow up a little higher.  There was a fire and hot cocoa. The kids threw snowballs and didn't want to leave when it was time to go.

That evening we watches some Christmas movies we made past years, read the Christmas story out of Luke, had hot cocoa and opened our Christmas Eve presents from Grandma Alyce and Grandpa Bill.  The kids got PJs and Jake and I got socks.  We got a laugh when the boys tried theirs on and they either kept falling off or they pulled them up over their heads.  They were just a wee bit on the big side.
We also opened our Christmas Eve book and read it.

The sister missionaries joined us for the last part of the evening.  We read another Christmas book with them and then they showed a video about the Savior.


When we tucked the kids in bed we realized that Tamsyn's second frog (one had already died) and her fish that she has had since her 8th birthday died.  It wasn't too traumatic, maybe because the fish was really old and she wasn't too attached to the frog yet, or maybe it was because the excitement of Christmas Eve softened the blow.  Not sure which