In the Days Leading up to Christmas. . .

My posts about Christmas have fallen to the wayside.  And now it's all over for another year, but I wanted to put a few pictures up to remember.  

It's been a tradition to have the children sleep under the tree one night before Christmas each year.  This year, only Aiden and Conor were home for most of the month, but they wanted to do it, so we blew up the air mattress and set them up.  Actually, though, they slept in the family room instead of in the livingroom where the tree is, so they could watch a movie.  Conor loves family time of any sort, and I'm always so grateful when one of his older siblings is willing to have patience and indulge him.  Aiden is a good big brother.  So, in the spirit of the season, I let them stay up as late as they wanted (which ended up to be 11:30pm), eat corn dogs in bed, and watch a movie, and I went up to bed.  They were still sound asleep when I came down in the morning, so cute.  

It was pretty pointless to try and keep it a secret.  Aiden's (and the boys) big present was a basketball hoop that was delivered a few days before Christmas.  It was so huge and so heavy, and Aiden saw the UPS guys trying to get it around to the back patio.  Since he was leaving the day after Christmas for his dad's, I let him go ahead and set it up so he could have some time to play.  It took 2 days and separate shifts of 4 other guys to get the thing together.  Aiden is over-the-moon happy about it.

Here is the crew that finally finished it:

Obviously, from the picture above, Lyndsay is home in between semesters.  (She finished her first semester!)  We had a few cookie baking days to have something to give friends and neighbors.  The Melted Snowman Cookies I saw on Pinterest.

And these Cranberry Bliss Bars I found on a blog.  So amazing.  Also, we made some Ginger Crinkles from one of my cookie cookbooks.

We made 14 plates of cookies and delivered them on Christmas Eve.

Before Conor went to bed, there was a letter to Santa to write.  He took this task very seriously:

In the end, this is his letter:

From what I hear, the Jolly Old Elf was just so thankful to have those Brown Butter Snickerdoodles (my new true cookie love) that he couldn't have given a Ho! Ho! Ho! about that silly carrot.