Christmas Eve

 I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas.  We had a good Christmas but a quiet one. It was not like Christmases of past where there was lots of people, lots of gifts and lots of laughter and fun. This was our first Christmas without my MIL. She was greatly missed by all of us.

Thursday Monkey's school had a little Christmas concert.

After they sang we were invited to the classroom to help the kids decorate gingerbread men.

And a picture with her teacher

Christmas Eve is the big night for us. In Polish tradition we have a big family meal. We don't eat meat Christmas Eve so our protein is fish. Usually we do a traditional 13 dishes, one to represent each month of the following year and one to represent the year.  If you want good luck in the following year you need to eat a little bit from each of the dishes.

This year I wasn't really into Christmas, I only did partial decorating and we didn't do all 1 dishes.  For dinner we had 2 kinds of fish, halibut and red snapper, breaded and fried, sauerkraut and potato and cheese pierogies, picked herring, this potato and vegetable salad my mom makes, assorted pickled veggies, and borscht (beet soup) with mushroom dumplings. Rock doesn't eat fish so he and my cousin's fiance ordered and ate panzarottis. They also ate meat since it's not their tradition. For dessert Rock made this awesome Cranberry Pudding. I got the recipe from Aesthetic Nest.

After dinner we did presents. As a child we always did presents Christmas Eve, now we separate presents into  blocks to honor everyone's Christmas traditions.  We exchange presents with my cousin and her family, some of my parents gifts and Rock and I give the kids pj's every year so they look cute Christmas morning opening presents. Christmas morning we do presents from Santa and after breakfast we open the rest. It also allows for the kids to enjoy their gifts and not get overwhelmed with all the stuff at once.

The kids goofing off before dinner.

My cousin and her family.

Present Time

More goofing around.

My mom knit baby L this cute crocheted Santa suit.  Can you tell I'm a smitten Auntie?

 All the kids and my cousin.

And this is what our house looked like after Santa visited. We had not 1 but 2 special people visiting. The Tooth Fairy also made a visit.  On Wednesday Monkey lost her tooth but she saved it until Christmas Eve to give to the Tooth Fairy because she wanted to see if the 2 would meet. She wrote them both notes asking if they met each other and had check boxes for them to fill out. It was cute.

I'll share more photos later of our Christmas Day.

Ania