A Christmas Party to End All Christmas Parties!

A couple weeks before Christmas, we hosted the party of the century at our house! All of my side of the family that's in the area: Beck, Ben, Trevor, Megan, Sam, and Bri, came up (and down) and spent the weekend, and we had so much fun. Here are a few of the highlights, in no particular order.

A 500 piece puzzle. Classic

Megan and Leah

We all ate a ridiculous amount. I put the guests in charge of snacks and desserts, and wow. They provided quite the spread.

Our whole family came together to put together a second volume of Around the Kitchen Table this year. It's a collection of stories (80 of them, this time around!) with subjects ranging from growing up to falling in love to wetting your pants to gaining a testimony. Definitely a major highlight to our Christmas this year. Nate and I do the design (okay mainly it's Nate, but I get to watch.) Anyway, we kept it all pretty hush hush, but decided that that big a group of our family doesn't come together too often, so we broke our "wait till Christmas" rule and showed them the cover. This was the reaction when Addison opened one of the wrapped books.

Nate's the music coordinator in our ward, and he recruited Meg, me, Beck and Bri to sing in sacrament meeting. It was so stinkin' fun to throw together. We sang T Chemain Evans' O Come O Come Emmanuel/What Child is This.

Addison adores Trevor. Here they are dancing.

Beck and Ben were in charge of organizing a white elephant gift exchange. Not gonna lie, I'm usually not the hugest fan, but this one was so fun. And hilarious. The trading portion got pretty intense. There were some pretty amazing gifts, and also some not so amazing ones. For example, Addison and Nate were in charge of getting ours and they grabbed a can of sardines in mustard sauce from the dollar store. Probably about the same time, Megan and Sam were getting the same thing (minus the mustard).

HAHA! Megan and Sam ended up with BOTH of the sardines!

My spoils. Hair extensions.

A bear piggy bank and bugs that grow in water.

Trevor not appreciating the extensions, although he did like the toothpicks.

We spent a LOT of time at the piano.

One night we thought about going to SLC to see the lights, but decided that we'd just go to our little town's display, which I think is awesome. A lot less driving and a lot fewer people.

Trevor was so cute.

Funny story: Ben lost his watch. Broke it in fact, while snowboarding down the hill  on a cookie sheet (it only went like 5 inches). And doing stroller tricks in the snow. He and Sam went back later and found it, luckily, and Beck had it fixed for Christmas.

It pretty well wiped Trevor out.

Not a bad-lookin' group. L-R: Rebecca, Trevor, Ben, Sam, Bryn, Megan, Brianna, Addison, Michelle, Leah, Nate

The gents. They did get in some good NBA Jam on Beck and Ben's wii.

Hi. I'm Leah and I'm darn cute.

Beck and Ben brought Beans and we had lots of fun playing it. Addison was making up versions of it with toys the next morning. And to Nate's great surprise and delight (okay, so it's not his very favorite game ever), Santa brought it to us for Christmas!

No pics of this, but Mom and Dad provided us with all the classic Christmas movies (claymation, Garfield, Charlie Brown, etc.) And I'm pretty sure we watched all of them.

To end things with a bang, our NBA Jam session on the final night was interrupted by a phone call at about 10 to midnight. Nate went against his better judgment and answered it to hear a recording from the police department instructing us to lock the doors and move away from windows because there was an armed gunman in the area. Nice. It put something of a damper on the mood, and we finished up the game and tried to figure out what was going on by looking at news websites, facebook, and twitter. Not much info, so we had a prayer, pulled Meg and Sam's mattress upstairs, and headed to bed (Ben with a butcher knife). We all had the heebie jeebies. Nate and I got everyone tucked in and stayed up listening to the police radio until we got the "all clear" call. We found out the next day that someone had barricaded himself in his house after shooting his wife (who got out and was okay) and had a short standoff with the police involving a semi-automatic weapon. Really nice. But we were relieved to find out that it was farther away from our house than we'd originally thought, and apparently this family had a history with the police - visits once a month at least.

 Anyway, that was the last family gathering of that magnitude that we'll have the pleasure of hosting for quite a while, I think, between Bri making big plans that don't involve BYU at the moment and the fact that we sent Beck and Ben off to move halfway across the country just this morning. It's sad, but we definitely finished things out right. It was the best weekend!