Our Little Family Christmas Morning

Because we slept at my mom and dad's place, the sleeping arrangements were a little goofy. Josh and I slept in the basement bedroom. Riley was supposed to sleep upstairs in the crib, because Adrienne will only sleep in Grandma's "big girl bed" now, and Meg, Chris and Adee also spent the night in case Brynn decided to make an early arrival. However, in the middle of the night, Riley decided she was scared of Santa landing on the roof, so she ended up downstairs on an air mattress with Grandma and THEN she was worried about Santa coming through the chimney, so Grandma had to tell her Santa was going to leave her toys at her house, not Grandma's house so she would go to sleep finally.

Around 7:30 a.m., my mom brought Riley down to wake up Josh and I and then we found out Santa really DID come to Grandma and Grandpa's house. Sneaky guy! (And lots of fun packing a car ahead of time and hiding everything!) She opened the presents from Santa and Baby Jesus and she was SO excited to open her "Lightyear" toy, whom she also calls Buster. "He brought me what I wanted!" she screamed.

We have NO IDEA where she got it in her head that she wanted Toy Story's Woody and Buzz Lightyear from Santa this year. She has MAYBE seen the movie once and that would have been almost a year ago! But she was excited that Santa knew! We had gone to see Santa, but she got stage fright and forgot to tell him what she wanted, so it was really amazing that Santa figured it out.

I should also explain the Baby Jesus gift. When I was a kid, we had a manger that was empty at the beginning of Advent. We would do an advent chain with good deeds written on it, and for everything nice we did, we got a piece of straw to put in the manger. If there was enough straw at Christmas, Baby Jesus would appear on Christmas morning sleeping in the manger, and there would be a present from him to us for his Birthday. We modified this tradition a bit, but essentially, Riley got "straw" in the form of yellow paper strips where we wrote her good deeds down and put them in the manger. When we came home, Baby Jesus was sleeping under our Christmas tree.