About a Joy: I ♥ Christmas

There's a slight chance that Christmas has the same effect on me as that of a 5 year old. Only I'm able to calm myself down enough in order to cook a meal and I don't know any 5 year olds that can do that. So. Clearly I'm a descendant of Buddy the Elf.

Last night for the first time in several years we skipped the Christmas Eve evening service at church and stayed home.

Mistake.

The boys were so bored by the time 6 pm rolled around that we were all bickering about which Christmas movie to watch next.

I told the boys that they could open their traditional Christmas Eve gift of pajamas and movie at 5:30 since that's when it gets dark here and we made until 5:15 when I called it good because I couldn't tolerate their hyperactivity any longer.

The Muppet Christmas movie that Dawson is holding is stupid and now I have to find a suitable replacement. Jason made it very clear that he wants to own the Christmas Classics (Like the old school version of the creepy felt looking rudolph slow motion movies). I'm hoping that Walmart has them on sale tomorrow so that I can get in a huge long line and waste my day away trying to buy it.

Of course in my haste to get the boys sitting still in front of a tv, I completely forgot to take a picture of them in their new pajamas so I forced them to take a picture in them in front of the tree this morning before opening presents.

We actually managed to wake up early enough to get all of the presents under the tree before the boys woke up.

Dawson woke up before Evan and begged to wake up Evan on a consistent basis until I ran and hid in our basement closet when he wasn't looking so he couldn't ask anymore.

He finally woke up and I forced the yearly Christmas day on the stairs picture upon them.

Then I talked them into standing in front of the tree for the pajamas picture.

They got to open their stocking first, because that's how it's done.

They each got a Star Wars Ornament and couple of other things that I would have showed you but I didn't get a picture because Christmas at our house is chaotic. I did get a video though but it won't load for some reason. So I'll allow you the privilege of imagining them opening their gifts in their stockings.

Wasn't that fun?

I was trying to remember if I've every wrapped their stocking gifts before. I don't know why I did this year. I guess I was overcome with Christmas cheer and crap.

This year was the year of Lego for Dawson. He asked for Lego gift cards on repeat. So he got a ton of Lego gift cards. I asked him if we could turn them in for cash so that I could get this plaid poncho from Nordstrom that I've been wanting.

The number one item on Evan's Christmas list this year was this giant remote control crane that he saw in some spoiled kids' YouTube video.

Dawson of course begged for a Lego haul so that he could continue to enchant his YouTube following with new videos.

Jason put the crane together for Evan so that Evan could use the grappler attachment to clean up the Christmas after math.

Of course the giant crane was only a fraction of the price of that over priced Lego set so Evan's big gift was a new tablet.

I've been telling him his old tablet was lost for approximately 3 weeks now.

Speaking of Evan, I found these super cute $5 plush Star Wars dolls (are they dolls? What do you call them?!) at Kohl's this year and I bought some for Evan. Then I wondered if there were any more for sale that I was missing so I looked them up on Ebay. I bough the only 4 that there were available. Turns out I can steal them out of Evan's bed while he's sleeping and sell them on Ebay for double the money!

Jason bought me coffee mugs this year. And if you'll look to the bottom left corner of the picture you can also see my new "OMG It's Santa" t-shirt.

Dawson made us Christmas tree ornaments out of Legos.

Finally it was time to bribe the boys to do our annual Christmas pictures:

Surprisingly, bribing doesn't always work that well for Evan and we have to threaten all manner of nuclear even occurrences to get him to cooperate with us.