December was such a wonderful month. We had so much Christmas fun. We tried to do lots of fun things together as family and participate in Light the World. I feel so grateful for this family of ours. I love spending time with them and getting to teach my kids how much I love our Savior, Jesus Christ. Throughout the month we wrote down acts of service we saw and placed them in His manger by the tree. On Christmas morning before opening gifts we said and prayer and thanked God for all we have and read the gifts we gave the Savior this month. The kids did a great job serving and I hope they felt the true Spirit of Christmas.
Here is more of what we did this month!
We baked all our favorite Christmas treats!
Paul and I went on a Christmas date to Temple Square. This has become one of my favorite Christmas traditions. We had to rush it a bit because we can't leave the baby for too long :)
The kids made a ton of perler bead ornaments. Susie and Braden made one for their teachers one for Aunt Livy. Susie even made Paul one for Christmas in the shape of the Deathly Hallows. He loved it!
Susie had her first piano recital. She has learned so much this year and we love her piano teacher, Connie Lloyd.
My Christmas dreams came true when my best friend gave me a ticket for the Tabernacle Christmas concert. I can never get tickets! Kristin Chenoweth was the guest performer and it was so wonderful! Temple Square had about a million people there so finding parking was a miracle of itself. It was so fun though.
We went and visited Grandpa and sang him Christmas songs.
We delivered Christmas treats to our friends and neighbors. We made peppermint bark popcorn this year for the neighborhood and it was delish.
We had a fun family night when we went to the Ogden Christmas village and looked at the lights and little village houses. Then we to In N Out, yum!
One of our acts of service was to make Christmas cards and deliver them to the Beehive House in our neighborhood. The kids sang Silent Night and We Wish You a Merry Christmas to the residents and they all feel in love with Clark. He knows the lyrics pretty well and he is the cutest when he sings.
We had a little family party with Rebecca, Michelle, Benjamin, and their families. We had sandwiches and lots of treats and snacks and played Christmas song pictionary. I still can't believe how good they were at guessing the songs. One of Benajmin's kids (I think it was Mitt) took the chalk and scribbled all over the board, then some one on his team yelled White Christmas!
Yep, crazy!
We had a one hour sacrament meeting the Sunday before Christmas and made the kids dress up and bribed them to smile in front of the tree to see if we could get a picture :)
We invited our sweet Ukrainian neighbors to go with us and that was nice.
We got a little snow on Christmas Eve and went sledding. We were hoping for more snow but we took what we got. The kids love to sled and play in the snow!
We had a Christmas Eve devotional. Susie played a few songs on the piano, Braden sang Sleep Baby Jesus, and Clark sang Silent Night. I read a story about the symbols of Christmas and Paul read the account in Luke of the Savior's birth. I made simple costumes for the nativity this month and we got to use them and it was so fun. Clark wanted to be a lamb and he was a rather loud lamb. We tried not to laugh while Paul was reading the scriptures but it was pretty funny.
We had a snack food feast that night and watched Ben Hur. I just love that movie! The one with Charleton Heston of course. It is a great movie about how Christ can change your heart.
We opened presents on Christmas morning and literally played all day long. It was the best day! I loved spending Christmas with just our little family.
