I admit it, I love Christmas to a ridiculous degree. I love it like a five year old loves it. Christmas was a huge event in my house growing up and it was the source of many of my fondest childhood memories. Going to bed on Christmas Eve with our new pajamas that were a Christmas Eve tradition, waking up at the crack of dawn with butterflies in my stomach and then crawling into bed with my brother and sister while we watched the clock and waited for it to be the magical hour that our parents said we could wake them up to open presents, running out to see what Santa brought and then spending Christmas day playing games and eating way too much candy...I loved every second of it.
I'm all grown up now but I still feel like a kid every year at Christmas. I still go to bed with new pajamas on Christmas Eve. I make sure that everyone in the family has new pajamas for Christmas each year. My husband is always amused that I still wake up super early on Christmas morning and watch the clock with butterflies in my stomach, waiting for it to be the magical hour that I can wake my kids up and tell them to go downstairs and open presents. :) I still eat way too much candy and spend the day playing games and enjoying family time. Holiday traditions are really important to me. Every Christmas is exactly the same here and we all really look forward to it.
So here it is, 8am on the day before Christmas and the butterflies in my stomach have already started! The day before Christmas always seems like the longest day of the year. We have some fun things planned today that should take up some time. We're actually watching season 15 of Amazing Race as a family (we missed that season when it aired) and we have three episodes to finish up today. We have a game tournament planned for this afternoon and whoever wins gets to wear the Santa hat tomorrow morning and pass out the presents from under the tree. Tonight we will open our new pajamas, get hot chocolate and blankets and drive around and look at Christmas lights, which is Shawn's favorite tradition. Then we'll come home, have the annual photo shoot of the kids in front of the Christmas tree and then we'll sprinkle reindeer food in the front yard and put the Santa Key out so that Santa can get into our house (he doesn't go down the chimney because we have a gas fireplace with a glass front! :)). Then I'll tuck all the kids into bed, wait for them to fall asleep and Santa can finally do his job! If Christmas is my favorite day of the year, Christmas eve might just be my second favorite.
Shawn always takes several days off at Christmas so that we can spread our family fun out over several days. He took off yesterday and he doesn't have to go back until Tuesday. Yesterday we had a lot of fun watching Amazing Race and doing some other fun family things. Then last night we got on Skype and had a webcam visit with Clarissa's foster parents and my friend Jinha, which was really nice. It's nice to be able to show Clarissa to her foster parents. I send them pictures regularly, but they hadn't seen her live in a while, so that was really fun. There is a language barrier so all we can really do is say hi and wave, but we both manage to get our point across. They sang Clarissa her favorite Korean childrens song and we showed them how she can dance and do taekwondo kicks and it was a good time. They're really special to us, I'm glad that we've been able to maintain that relationship. They cry everytime they see Clarissa. I know how much it means to them to be able watch her grow and I'm glad that we've been able to do that for them.
Well, it looks like I killed about 20 minutes writing a blog post, so that means that we're 20 minutes closer to Christmas! I think now I'll go downstairs, make breakfast and get the party started. We have games to play, Amazing Race to finish and Christmas treats to eat. It should be a fun day!:)
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