Thank You, Santa!

Christmas has come and gone, and it was a marvelous one at the North house!

Actually, I think Santa stopped here last and just gave us everything that was left in his bag. When we got up Christmas morning all of the space under the tree was filled, from the floor to the bottom branches, and there were more gifts spread out across half of our living room floor. There was almost no room for the family!

But let me tell you about it, beginning with events leading up to Christmas.

First of all, about three weeks before Christmas Santa brought us a dishwasher!! How's that for exciting? My kids were actually excited about doing the dishes for a week or so. :-)

Last summer we got a My Twinn catalog in the mail. We girls were all very interested; Kaylie, Rachel and Jessica thought it would be good fun to have dolls that were their twins. But, the cost—ouch! We would have to ask Santa.

Well I got word from Santa that he wasn't bringing dolls from My Twinn, but that he would bring dolls that could be twins. He said it's really the clothes and hair-style that make the doll look like a twin—and he was right, of course. With the advance notice he gave me, I was able to make nightgowns, Christmas dresses and an outfit—even matching necklaces, with Lindsey's help—for each doll and girl. That was one of the big projects I'd told you about in my earlier post.

I also made a Pen-Ten-Gee game which is a strategy game I've never seen before, but looks like fun. And I'm still working on the creation of another board game called Relativity. We gave it a trial run last night, but it needs some tweaking.

We also had a treat-fest last week. We made fudge—and more fudge—and lots of banana bread, and mixed gingerbread cookie dough (although we still haven't baked the gingerbread cookies).

While all the projects were in the works we had the radio tuned to KBYU, our local classical station. Initially I had it tuned in so I could listen to my game show, the Piano Puzzler. But then they played great Christmas music all day long every day, so we kept it on. We heard a neat narrative called All is Calm, The Christmas Truce of 1914; we heard the entire Nutcracker Suite—delightful! And we got to listen to The Christmas Chronicles, a true and complete history of Santa Claus; it was a wonderful story.

The kids went to bed relatively early on Christmas Eve—around 10:00, I guess. And Bruce and I went down not too much later, just before midnight. Not bad! I woke up around 2:30 a.m. to find that Santa had filled our entire living room with gifts, and that Ryan and Rachel had taken their blankets downstairs and fallen asleep on the couch.

Well, the kids got us up at 6 a.m (as requested), and not a second sooner or later. But Jason did not play reveille at us this year. We told him he could only use the trumpet to wake us up if he played a Christmas carol. Actually, I think that would be a funny Christmas tradition. :-)

We were astounded at the number of gifts! It was easily over one hundred; it was overwhelming.

Now, you have to understand how Christmas morning goes at our house: We start out opening one gift at a time so we can see what everyone is getting; but pretty soon kids are jumping up and down in front of Bruce's and my face, and asking when they get to open their next present, and generally making a lot of noise. Due to the enormous volume of presents this year, there was even more jumping and excitement than usual. So picture-taking was virtually impossible, and after the first few gifts we pretty much lost track of what everyone was getting. I do remember seeing lots of new clothes and shoes, hot rollers and a hair-dryer; some very pretty necklaces that Sara, our piano teacher, made for us; the latest Harry Potter movie from Michael. We even got a jar of cold, hard cash!

But the biggest surprise of all was a Wii! Wii had no idea Santa would give us one of those—I didn't know we were that good! (The Wii made great leverage to get the kids to clean up the house later.)

About three-quarters of the way through the gift-opening we had all reached a saturation point and decided to take a break for breakfast. We had our traditional Christmas breakfast: yogurt with berries and Cool Whip, breakfast quiche and my fabulous Oven-Baked, Blueberry-Stuffed French Toast. Then everyone was revived enough to get back to opening the rest of the presents.

I can't say enough about Santa's generosity this year. It was really amazing!

After presents and food Bruce and I went back down for a long winter's nap. We got up again just before noon, and then we made the family rounds: Melanie's house, Grandma Johnson's house and Grandma North's house. At the North house we had some nice lunch/dinner, and Brad (Bruce's brother) gave us a TV! Our old, hand-me-down, console TV died around Thanksgiving time, so we'd been watching our DVD's on the computer. Brad was buying his family a new TV for Christmas, so he made us a gift of his old one, which is a nice set. And which we used late that night to watch Harry Potter.

Sadly, Grandma North had to spend Christmas in the hospital, but the latest update is that she's doing a little better now.

And now, tonight, even as I sit here, the family is creating their "Mii's" so they can play with the Wii. We've had a very fun holiday.

Thank you, Santa!