Christmas Eve!

Christmas Eve was very very magical!  We spend the day as a family with the combination of Swinton/ Tengelsen traditions. First and foremost, decorating sugar cookies for Santa.  This is always turned into a contest where Stan is the judge and no matter how hard anyone else tries Stan awards himself the 1st place trophy.

For the record, my cookie picture didn't turn out but I took a white cookie and made a snowflake out of tiny silver balls...just sayn'

After cookie decorating we had Christmas dinner. In Australia it is very popular to eat sea food on Christmas eve and Christmas day. The fish markets are open for 24 hours the day before Christmas eve and then they are closed on Christmas eve and Christmas day. This means around 4:00am the markets are jam packed full of people who are looking for fresh fish to BBQ the next day or day after and getting fish older than 3 days is a bad idea so EVERYONE has to come on this one day.  Stan got the salmon and shrimp- we didn't go all out this year. I made some corn and potatoes, we had some cherries and of course the traditional "crackers!"

Sea food on Christmas eve is also a Tengelsen (my maiden name) tradition. My mom used to tell us that Jesus was a fisher man so that is why we eat it...later we all realized Jesus was a carpenter but the tradition still stayed :-)

When you pull on the crackers a small crack goes off and out comes a toy, joke and crown. Here are Stan and the kids with their Christmas crowns!

After Christmas dinner the kids got into their PJ's and Stan read them all various Christmas stories.

After stories, the kids watched Christmas movies (miracle on 34th street, Elf, Polar Express and finally the Nutcracker Ballet (around midnight we started that one).

Olivia was determined to crack the Santa question (she is 9 years old) and stayed up most of the night with an I-phone to video who puts the gifts under the tree. I stayed up with her and told her I would sleep while she stayed up and then we would take turns. I was out and later Olivia hit me on the face and said "SANTA'S HERE" I woke up to look and realized she was sound asleep and was talking in her sleep :-)  So precious...she was dreaming!  Merry Christmas-