We had a great Christmas this year. I was really excited for it the whole month long. We got our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving and decorated it with Grammie and Grandpa. Mason was so excited. He got out his tool box and used his tools to "help" Grandpa screw the bottom of the Christmas tree into the stand. When he was decorating the tree he wanted to hang all the ornaments in the same spot. Sometimes he hung ornaments on other ornaments. It was very cute. Mason learned the songs Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas this year and often sang them at the top of his lungs when he was going to sleep. We wrapped all of our Christmas books, got more from the library to wrap, and I bought a few new ones, and then we put them all under the tree. Each morning Mason opened and we read one of the Christmas books. He really liked it. We also had a countdown calendar where we added a cotton ball to Santa's beard each morning to countdown to Christmas. We also taught Mason about the Nativity story and he loved to watch it on the tv, act it out with flannel figures, read about it, etc. He knows Christmas is about "when Baby Jesus was born" and he gets really excited about it. Christmas has been extra fun this year because Mason is old enough to really understand and be excited. It brings back that childhood excitement.
Kristin and Brandt and Linda and Dennis came here for Christmas, which has made it so much fun! On Christmas Eve we made gingerbread to make a gingerbread house and also made 2 gingerbread cookies - one for Mason and one for Santa (at Mason's request). Mason decorated the 2 cookies all by himself. He decided to unwrap a bunch of hershey's kisses and literally cover the cookies with those. Then he dumped a couple inches of red sprinkles on one of the cookies. It was very cute. He also left carrots out for the reindeer. There was candy sitting on the table to decorate our gingerbread house and Mason grabbed 2 chocolate coins and 2 peppermints, put them in stacks, and said one stack was for the reindeer and one stack was for Santa. He did that all on his own. It was very cute. Our gingerbread house turned out great this year. The frosting was perfect and actually got hard enough this year to really stick things together and the gingerbread house stood up perfectly. We also decorated sugar cones to look like Christmas trees and added those to our gingerbread yard. It was a lot of fun. We also decided to act out the Nativity for Christmas Eve this year. When my mom told Mason that we were going to act out the Nativity story he got so excited and said he needed to get all the stuffed animals out of his room for the manger. He got every single one and put them in a pile with lots of warm blankets. We used a stuffed dog wrapped in a blanket to be baby Jesus - with no little girls in the family yet we don't have any dolls. Mason loved the baby Jesus and kept wanting to sit by it. He didn't want to leave. Brandt dressed up as a shepherd and Mason was a shepherd with him for a minute, but like I said, he just wanted to sit by the baby Jesus so he stayed in the manager with Jesus, and mommy and daddy (Mary and Joseph). I guess he is a great example for us all - staying close to Christ should be what we all want to do always, above everything else. Grandma Buckner was an angle and Grammie and Kristin were wisemen. Grandpa Dennis recorded it and Grandpa Buckner missed it because he was at work. :(. It was very quick and simple, but fun, especially for Mason. He wanted to sleep with baby Jesus that night and has wanted to sleep with, sit with, and play with baby Jesus almost every day since then. Another family Christmas Eve tradition we have is that we all get new pajamas for Christmas with my parents. Mason loved this because he loves opening presents. He opened his pajamas and was so excited that he insisted on helping everyone else open theirs too. So cute! To top off our Christmas Eve it started snowing right before Mason went to bed. We were so excited that we were going to have a White Christmas! After Mason went to bed we played Catch Phrase for a while and then Kristin, Brandt, and my parents went home around 9:30. It kept snowing and the wind really picked up. It was getting pretty crazy outside. Around 10:00 the power went out. Luckily we had a candle already lit to make the house smell good and we had a few flashlights.
Around 10:15 my mom called and said the power was out at Wal-Mart and my Dad needed us to go to the store and help cover all the meat with cardboard so it wouldn't go bad. Kristin and Brandt picked Chad and I up and we met my parents there. Unfortunately, all of the cardboard was in the bailer which was locked shut (which is never supposed to happen) so we didn't have anything to cover the meat. After a little while of trying to figure things out I suggested we get all of the ice out of the ice boxes at the front of the store so we used shopping carts and emptied those and covered as much meat and cold food as we could. More of my dad's management came quickly after and they found a little bit of cardboard and some plastic to help cover stuff up. We helped until around midnight when we had used up all the ice and there wasn't much more to do. My dad stayed until around 1:30 when the power came back on (it only came back on at Wal-Mart, not at our houses). Then they removed all the ice and stuff and he came home. Unfortunately an hour later the power went out at Wal-Mart again and Kristin, Brandt, and my parents had to go back and redo everything. The power did come back on for good until after 6 a.m. That is when they got home. So no one, especially them, got much sleep on Christmas Eve. This was the one night a year that the Wal-Mart stores close, the one night my dad didn't have to worry about what was going on there, and then he had to go in anyway. Bummer! It was kind of cool being in Wal-Mart after hours though.
Mason woke up around 7:15 a.m. Christmas morning. The original plan was just for my parents and Brandt and Kristin to come over when he woke up, but since they didn't get home until after 6, we decided to open presents at 9:30 a.m. It was a little hard for Mason to wait because he was so excited to open all the presents, but he did a good job. We let him open his stocking and he was really excited about that. We also showed him that Santa and the reindeer had eaten all the things he left for them and that was exciting too. We also watched Mater's Tall Tales in our bed with him for a while and then let him open one present. He picked the present that happened to be the remote control car from Grammie and Grandpa. That was good because then he got to spend time playing with that while waiting for everyone to get here. He was really patient! Mason loved opening presents. He loved everything he received and had so much fun opening them. He did a little happy scream after opening almost everything and wanted to play with what he got right away and take it out of the box. He also really enjoyed passing out presents to everyone else and helping them open them. Grammie gave him a few wooden cars/trains for his wooden train track, all individually wrapped, and he got so excited about each one. After he opened it he ran and put it in his room with his other train stuff. He was also really excited about his new box of wooden train track, the hungry hippos game, the excavator (he immediately asked for some dirt to dig in), the garbage truck, and remote control helicopter. We all had a really good Christmas and got some great stuff. My mom gave us kids 72-hr kits and LED lanterns. It was funny to get these after losing power on Christmas Eve - just goes to show we really do need this stuff and never know what might happen. The best part about Christmas was just having so much of our family here to spend time with.
The rest of Christmas vacation has been a lot of fun too. Friday night Chad and I went with Brandt and Kristin to the mall and then to Comedy Sportz in Boise. It was fun to spend time with them. Saturday, Chad and I, Dennis, my parents, and Kristin and Brandt all went to the temple. Linda and Mason met us afterward for dinner at one of our favorite Chinese restaurants. It was a lot of fun. It snowed again Saturday night, so on Sunday we built a snowman in the backyard and Kristin taught us how to make snow ice cream with snow and sweetened condensed milk. It was pretty good! There was still snow on Monday so we took Mason sledding at the park. He loved it! He would jump up and say, "Let's do it again" after going down each time. He even walked/ran up the hill by himself for quite a while and one time carried the sled up by himself for a while. We all had a lot of fun.
