Sunday, December 25, 2005

A very Merry Christmas......

Merry Christmas everyone................

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What? My kids are normal. Honest.

Our festivities start on Christmas Eve at around dinner time. We gather at my in-laws for dinner and to open my in-laws presents and the grandkids (all 11 of them) open one of their presents. It's pretty much a madhouse with 11 kids, (ages 3 to 18) all my brother and sister-in-laws and the grandparents.

At 9 PM our son and I went to evening services with my folks at my church and my wife and our daughter went to Mass at their church. I'm Protestant and my wife's family is Catholic but it all works out since that last time I checked, there's only one God:-) Anyways, it was a beautiful sevice and our son enjoyed himself at a different church.

Christmas morning I am usually the first one up, but this year for some reason-I didn't wake up until our son woke me up at 8:30. Working 3rd shift is rough on your sleep patterns on days off.

We opened gifts, my kids got some cool stuff, we bought my wife a very nice winter coat, some PJ's and warm socks. Me? I have a habit of buying my own Christmas presents........This year I bought myself an iPod and a really nice digital camera. I also bought a new set of noise reduction headphones.

I like to buy stuff.

On Christmas day, my in-laws travel to all their kid's houses and have Christmas with each family and then go to my parents house for Christmas dinner with my parents, us and one of my sister-in-laws. It sounds kind of confusing, but it all works out.

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This is a crystal bowl filled with ornaments that used to belong to my Aunt Helen. This is the first Christmas without her and I really missed her. One things for sure, every Christmas I have for the rest of my life will have that bowl and ornaments as the centerpiece.

You can check my Flickr account for pictures of all the craziness, I have a few posted here in this blog entry, but the majority of them are over there. My camera just kinda gets handed around and everyone takes pictures of whatever floats their boat.

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Like this picture. My kids decided I needed a new hat made out of Connex to cover up my bald forehead. Didn't work very well, did it?

Everyone should be as lucky as me. I have 2 great kids, a wife I love very much and great parents, in-laws, brothers and sister-in-laws and 9 nieces and nephews.

Life is good.

3 comments:

The Old Bag said...

Love the new hair! Er, how's it fit under the helmet??

Ptelea said...

I must be really out of it because I have no idea what Connex are (other then things you stick on your face and head!) Thanks for sharing your Christmas!

The Donut Guy said...

Here's a link to the closest thing i could find as to what they are.

http://www.magz.com/

Sorta like that :-)