Both last year and this year I really struggled with when and how to celebrate Christmas. We are so blessed that all of our family is close, including extended aunts, uncles, and cousins. However, everyone has a celebration of some sort and it is just not practical nor possible to make it to all of them, especially when they are on the same day. In my opinion, the quality time spent together is more important than what day you do your celebrations. It is really hard to give up Christmas day traditions, but as families grow and change some things have to give.
This year, Justin and I decided we didn't want to spend a lot of our holiday in the car. So we spread it out. Our first day of Christmas was on December 23 and it was a day for our family of three. We spend the entire day at home. In the morning we made cupcakes for Jesus' birthday and frosted and decorated cookies. Aria was thrilled to help out and Justin and I both agreed it was the beginning of a Christmas tradition for our family. After Aria's nap, we opened our presents. We started by reading the Christmas story from the book Aria got in her stocking. The we took turns opening our presents. Last year we decided we would each get three presents to represent the gifts brought to Jesus. We followed suit this year, only Justin and I decided to donate our "spiritual gift" to the Advent Conspiracy. So, the gift opening was a small celebration, but it was a ton of fun because we could open each present and play with it some before rushing on to the next one. We were on no time schedule and thoroughly enjoyed giving. We put the video camera on a chair and recorded the whole thing so neither of us had to worry about holding it or taking pictures. Aria really enjoyed opening all the presents (including ours) and playing with her new basketball hoop, nativity set, and underwear!
After the presents, we made a homemade pizza and Aria got to help with that, too. I'm sure that has become an offical tradition, as well. We topped off the night with the cupcakes and it was definitely the best Christmas celebration Justin and I had in our eight Christmases as a family.
I couldn't begin to capture all of that for this blog, so I made a video with some highlights. It is long. It could have been extremely long. I didn't put any of the present opening video in. I put several cookie decorating tidbits because you also get a glimpse of her singing the Glo----Aria song. I had a hard time cutting parts out because my kid is the cutest kid ever. So, enjoy six minutes of our all day Christmas, 2011.
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