Sarah and James Plus Two : May I welcome you, to Christmas morning!

You know those scenes in the movies where everyone rushes down the stairs on Christmas morning and tears open every single present as fast as they can? Yeah, well that's not the way it's done in the Spencer house. If you haven't gathered from previous posts, we are an extremely organized and well-planned out type of family. So instead of the mad rush we have a much different type of Christmas. Always have, probably always will. Here's the way it works. We get up Christmas morning and open our stockings. My mom always does an awesome job filling the stockings the night before. While we do that, we eat the much anticipated cinnamon rolls, yum! Then we get ready to go to to church. Since we get dressed up for Christmas Eve services, Christmas day attire is much more informal. We have joked with my dad for several years that one time we are all just going to show up in our pajamas! So far, none of us have had the guts. After church, we come home and eat yet more cinnamon rolls and settle in our places to open presents. The tradition is, my mom passes out one present to every person and we take turns opening the presents, starting from the youngest and going up to the oldest. Being second oldest in my family growing up was never fun cuz I always had to wait what seemed like forever to open my presents! When that round is over we start again and continue until all presents have been opened. Sounds boring, I"m sure. But this way we get to stretch out the day and have it last longer. I am so bad at remembering to take pictures during the actual opening of the presents so this year the only pics I have are of the clean-up after and the presents we got for the baby ;) After presents, we get ready for dinner. We usually forgo the traditional ham for Christmas since half my family became vegetarians long ago and opt instead for Mexican food! My mom and dad make the best Mexican food too! Yum! After dinner we play games or watch movies. This year we played the new Mario Bros Wii. It was fun seeing everyone else get killed playing that game too! Then dessert (if you couldn't tell already, we like to eat!) which is usually my mom's killer cheese pie... no it's not pie made out of cheese, it's like cheesecake but creamier and less cakey. Then for me at least, there's the long drive back to Tucson. I love celebrating Christmas with my crazy family and I can't wait for next year when we add a few more people into the mix. I"m excited to share our traditions with our baby boy :) Here are a few pics that I did get of Christmas:

Wow! That is a giant present! What could it be???

Hee-hee :) It's Emily! My dad got my mom a bunch of big presents and when we were cleaning up, we thought it would be really funny to put Emily in the giant gift bag, cute huh? :)