Christmas in Eau Claire

After a pretty busy Christmas Eve, we looked forward to the next couple days of quiet around our house.  For a couple years, we had contemplated staying home for Christmas, but wanting to see family, we always ended up traveling.  This year, with John's work at the church, we had to be around on Christmas and he got a couple other days off, so it was the perfect ushering-in of a new tradition of us being home on Christmas.  Lovely!

Christmas morning came quickly after a pretty late night with John at the 11pm service at Jacob's Well.  The boys woke up chatting in their room and we heard, "Let's go get Mom and Dad!".  So, we were up early to see if Santa came...

 Sure enough, the boys must've been so good this year!  The reindeer food was all gone and Santa enjoyed his cookies, even leaving a return note for Logan and Bennett.

 Santa brought some special gifts for the boys to share...

 And some goodies in the beloved stockings, too.

 Logan and Bennett are both budding Packers fans...a little hard to swallow for some of us Minnesotans, but they are coming by it honestly - living in Packer Country when the team is really doing well makes for a lot of Packer influence (even without our help!).

 Logan and Bennett each got to go shopping with us and choose a gift for each other, so they loved exchanging presents and telling about how they chose the special gifts for each other.

We finally got to open the special gift Logan made for us at preschool this year - it waited patiently under the tree...

 Logan was so proud of his little nativity scene and how he made the Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus.  Precious!

The aftermath!

The presents we gave were mostly small and lots of them were activities we could spend the day doing together.  The boys were anxious to work on a couple of the projects they got so after a special breakfast, we got to work!

 The boys also really enjoyed their new game table from Santa and that kept us busy most of the day.

 Bennett is singing either Hark the Herald (the "glooriaaaaaa part") or "Away in a Manger" - his two favorite Christmas carols!

 And of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without a special birthday cake for Baby Jesus - our Lord and Savior, born on Christmas for each one of us!  The boys really took pride in baking and decorating the cake.  We even got to share it with our friends, Mollie and Aubrey.

Hope you all had a blessed Christmas celebrating the birth of Jesus!