Christmas Eve Tradition

I'd say that one tradition that we are consistent with is that of sleeping under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. (You can see Natalie there telling Ethan to go to sleep so Santa can come...)

Sleeping around the tannenbaum isn't something that Corey or I did growing up. But the kids did it in 2007 and they're the ones that deserve the credit for keeping it up through these past 10 years. Here are those little kids in 2007 - 

Sophi ready to have visions of sugar plums dance in her head.

This year they wanted Owen to join them. And it was a lesson learned. Sure, he seemed to snuggle up fine, but it did not work out well for Santa's helpers.

Note to self for when they want Daniel to sleep over with them next year: Just say no.

 

It is now 3:00 a.m. Christmas morning and we're not done yet going through gifts or wrapping them. Owen was still awake at 1:30 (cute little face) and so was Wes. 

Wes was reading but said Owen was the one to blame for keeping them both up. 

Owen liked Lily's dog Bunky Bunky.

Lily! Go to bed! Taking one last picture at midnight and saying goodnight for the last time (I wish) 

So at 1:30 I took Owen upstairs and we lay down on the floor with him in our room. (He doesn't want to sleep in the crib anymore, so he's kept with the toddler tradition of sleeping at the foot of our bed on the floor - like Sophi and Natalie.) I set an alarm for 20 minutes, enough time for Owen to fall asleep and for me to not be too deep in sleep and unable to get up and finish our Santa work. Corey is still wrapping things and taking photos and putting them on the computer. We both bought stuff, he took it all and wrapped it at his parent's house, and took photos along the way then put post-its on the presents. He's almost done wrapping I hope, and then we'll go through it all and make sure things are equally distributed.

Update - Picture taken at 4:45 a.m. At 5:30 we were finally done and headed to bed. 

Corey asked if I thought we should go through and take off the post it notes with numbers and replace them with the kids' initials or name. I said no. That would seriously have taken us another hour. Let's just go to bed.

I hope we work out a better system for next year, cause I'm too old to pull all-nighters. Unfortunately Santa had to resort to the sugary carbs via the plate of cookies left out for him to keep his energy up until the job was finished.

I hope we get a nap tomorrow. To all a good night.