Joyeux Noel!

This year for Christmas, my side decided to do a theme Christmas. The theme this year was the country of France in honor of part of our heritage. Danielle and I decided to take it a little further and dress the part. We found some vintage dresses to wear and looking at these pictures makes me laugh even more!! Danielle's dress was from the 50's and she looks like a cross between a homemaker and Mrs. Claus. My dress was from the 40's and all I see is Mary Poppins crossed with Tom Petty. Maybe we weren't as cool as I thought?!? Hahaha!
Sawyer loved having his Chrissy around and when we said goodbye to her yesterday he kept saying, "No go bye bye!" That made me all the more sad to see them leave again for Colorado.
Here we are whipping up the French meal. For Christmas the French serve a 5 course meal. For the first course we served French onion soup. It was delicious but the younger kids only focus on the onions and didn't eat very much of it. The second course was a salad (can't remember what we called it) with almonds and strawberries in it and then it was on to the 3rd course-the ham, potatoes and bread. Doing the courses was a lot of fun and everyone not in the kitchen was excited to find out what we would be serving next.
The fourth course was fruit and the final course (we did this one later on) was the desserts. I made 2 Yule logs and there was a cheesecake and some other desserts. Yum!
Mom definitely needs a bigger kitchen to fit the five of us cooks in there (:
After the meal, my dad sat down and told us a little about our ancestors from France. He has been studying our family tree for awhile and it was interesting to hear what he found out. I didn't like finding out however, that my ancestors owned slaves in Haiti at one point.
Here's Ashley, Jonnie, Mitchell, Phil (Allison's boyfriend), and Allison.
Next, we opened you guessed it-french gifts! It was so fun to see what everyone came up with that was french. Some of the gifts were truffles, vanilla noir body lotion, french bingo game, kids french cookbook, french photo board, homemade soaps and body oil, french wine, french note cards, make-up, jewelry with french words, etc. It was challenging when finding the gifts, but fun to see what everyone else came up with!

Here Jonnie is reading a gift from Mitchell. It was a book he made called "Remember when, Jon" and it was memories of all the things him and Jonnie did together. It will be cherished forever and made me cry when I listened to Jonnie read it out loud....Another French tradition is having the kids do a puppet show. We had the kids all make sock puppets and I loved what everyone came up with. When we asked Sawyer what his puppets name was he said "Santa" in this high pitched voice-so adorable! Jonnie's was named Billy and Alaina's was named Annie. I laughed when Aidan created a Llama-so cute.

Here they are making their puppets.
Here is the show! Neve was the queen who ordered her family and animals to do all the chores. It was simple and Neve lost interest pretty fast, but it was adorable (:

It was a lot of fun this year and we also found out that next summer we will be expecting the 18th grandchild!! Jonnie ended up staying overnight at my mom's that night with Mithchell and Aidan. They had a lot of fun and made some lasting memories-thanks mom and dad!