Christmas time!

Our Christmas festivities started on Dec. 1 this year with the traditional Breakfast with Santa that Pat's aunts do.  It's fun yet possibly CRAZY!  Pat has a REALLY big family with lots of cousins, so when all those cousins get together with their own kids, it's a lot of people!  But the kids have fun and they get to meet Santa.  Check out Millie's yearbook of meeting Santa:

 



This was Christmas 2011, she was pretty dang excited to sit on anyone's lap!

Now, Christmas 2012, she knows the difference between laps and her dad's beard and Santa's beard!  This was our best shot!








Here's all of us (well, all the little cousins and some big cousins too!):








This winter season has really been pretty spectacular in the snow department, especially if you are comparing it to last year, so Pat's had some nice backcountry ski days.  His first day out, there was so much snow, it was pretty much unskiable but still awesome!  We don't get too many pictures of Pat when he goes skiing, mainly his friends and brothers.  Here's a shot of Pat's brother Ben when they went skiing at Snowbird right after Christmas.  Lucky them, it was probably THE BEST ski day of the year, and quite possibly in the top 10 of all time!  You can check out more of Pat's ski days here.

Millie loves to play outside in the snow.  Her Honey's house (grandma) has a nice small hill perfect for babies to slide down so one afternoon all the kiddos came over for sledding.  Millie could seriously play forever out there!

More festivities start on "Christmas Adam."  Instead of Christmas Eve, we celebrate the night before "Eve" and call it "Adam" with the Rich family.  We have a delicious dinner and a traditional nativity scene.  We are getting quite a few little kids in the family and we are running out of parts, I suggested having animals like a sheep but that wasn't liked too much so instead we just had lots of angels and shepherds.  Millie was a very uncooperative angel who sat on my map most of the time, but that's okay!


I was in charge of sugar cookies (LOVE IT!) so this year, I made snowmen.  YUM!








These were relatively easy to make, but when you have to make 24 of them, it still takes several hours.

On the real Christmas Eve we were met with another huge snowstorm!  Despite the crazy weather, all of Pat's cousins made it over to the Rich's house to sing carols.  We usually go over to Mootzie's to sing to her on Christmas Eve, so the party just moved it's way on over. 

 Then on to Christmas Eve with my family.  We have it at Olafsson's.  I love Christmas Eve dinner - Norwegian meatballs (not even gonna try to spell it!), mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade rolls, corn and jello.  It's sooooooooooooo good!  Everyone totally over eats but no one cares, it's so delicious!  For dessert, we have a traditional rice pudding with an almond hidden inside.  Whoever finds the almond gets a prize.  Since our group is so big, we always to two almonds.  My dad found one and I think, but I can't remember, so correct me if I'm wrong (I used to be so good at writing this down) Grandma Madsen found the other.  I usually never win.  I think I've won like twice my entire life!

Christmas morning we got to do a group video call with my family - super fun but my brother was a little mean and kept muting us!  Pat and I quickly opened our small family's presents before the herd came over again to have breakfast and open a few gifts.  I was pretty excited to give Millie her presents, a ballon, her very own chair and a quiet book that my cousins and I worked on in the summer.  She was most happy about the balloon and her chair!  Then the masses arrived for more food and fun!  Here are my great sister-in-laws and our Poppy!  

We spent some time just hanging out before going over to my parents house for turkey sandwiches and too open gifts with the Osmonds.  It makes for a BUSY Christmas season but it's nice to see everyone!

Now, you might be thinking, great, what a nice Christmas, but it's not over yet!  After Christmas we have an "adult night" with Pat's family.  We all get together, have another dinner and open sibling gifts.  I got a nice massage and Pat got some gadget for his camera!  Thanks Marse and Lance.  I guess we don't have any pics of that....oops!  The culmination of that evening was the video that we gave his dad.  All the kids and in-laws were interviewed questions about Jim and then Pat went through a whole bunch of old family movies and edited everything together to make the best familyi movie EVER.  Honestly, it was so awesome and fun to watch.  Thanks to Pat for all his hard work putting that together - let me tell you it was a PROJECT!

So, a little late in coming but Merry Christmas to everyone!