There were lots of good memories made this Christmas Season! We were rather late getting started since our winter break didn't start until Dec 22 this year. So it made Christmas quite hectic I thought. We decided one night to have a Cooper taco night. We invited the whole family and we got everyone here but the Idaho kids! We even had Stacey & Terri down from Cedar City so that was super fun. Ashley's family came out from Henderson and Christina had just gotten here from Utah as well. We had a yummy feast of tacos and I made the now famous Cranberry cake with hot butter sauce. Oh my gosh it is good. I got the recipe from the OPD Christmas party a couple of weeks before. After dinner we sang Christmas carols and the guys did some Christmas errands before they joined us.
Coop wasn't much into singing so played cars with Grandpa!
For Christmas Eve this year we did something totally different. Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves for only having a grand total of 5 people for dinner we had a fondue since that only works with a small crowd! If the oil had stayed hot it would have been fabulous. It kept cooling off which really annoyed me but it was still fun. The chocolate fondue for dinner was of course the family favorite.
Christmas morning dawned bright and early at around 8:30 ish. We had a lovely sleep in for the first time on about 20 years since that's how old Hayden is. He insists on a early start each Christmas morning. Not this year since he was in Chile! We got up and made the traditional sandwiches for brunch.
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| The tree wasn't bursting at the seams with gifts for the first time ever. |
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| We opened presents just the three of us |
This was last year. Quite a difference huh...
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Poor Hayden. I spent the first 15 minutes in a panic trying to call and text everyone who was supposed to come skype with him and praying they would get there before he had to go. Luckily he was on for about and hour and a half so there ended up being plenty of time to round everyone up.
Love these fun glasses he showed us! Wow he hadn't changed a bit. It was so fun to see him and talk to him. He sounded the same and he looked the same! Just a little older.
That's Jeff listening in on the cell phone since we didn't have the premium skype to conference call. Now I
wish I had thought about getting that!
And here is Hayden in Chile with us on the computer. How cool is that. We had such a great visit. It was a little hard to hear sometimes since I am partially deaf and Coopers aren't the quietest whispers haha but it was so fun that everyone could run over and visit with him. Loved it when he and Charlie talked spanish too. What a fun Christmas day we had.
The day after Christmas we decided to go to go to Vegas and spend our Christmas $$. We spent the afternoon running around the mall with the crowds and then we thought we would spend the $$ mom and dad gave us at the Winn Buffet. So when we got there there were people every where. The line for the buffet was two and a half hours long so we thought we might try Caesar's new buffet instead. It as only 2 hours so we really saved there!! We got seated at 10pm and the line closed behind us. They stopped serving at 10:30 and we had to be out the door by 11 so we scarfed in our dinner. Christina and I were in quite a panic to see everything and pick and then cram it in while we could. As a result we just loaded up the table and ate ourselves to crammed full. We had a really fun time but I can't imagine how fun it would have been if we hadn't been rushed!!
A couple of nights later we had Alisha and Ashley out and we had a tea party for us girls. We watched "The Inheritance" which is an awesome movie and had real homemade scones and clotted cream from England! (thanks to Carolyn's Christmas gift) Wow was that ever fun. We even got out the teacups and had a huge assortment of herbal teas. We had a blast that night and a good cry during the movie haha!
Another epic Christmas!
