Christmas 2010 (or the Year of the Nativities)

Rachel is almost 3 and 1/2 and this is the first year she has really been excited about Christmas. She loved everything about the month of December. Christmas lights, Christmas cookies, Christmas countdown paper chain, wrapping presents (which she called "making presents" and asked to do every day), etc. But her favorite thing by far (well, maybe tied with presents) was nativities. We have a nativity that Matt's mom gave us that the kids are allowed to play with and Rachel was fascinated with the idea. I didn't realize how many places you can see nativities, but she found them all. In fact, anything involving a group of people standing around in different looking clothes became a nativity.
The week before Christmas I changed my Facebook profile picture to the above picture. I'm Mary, in the middle. The others are my sister and cousins. I love this picture from my past! Rachel saw it and said, "A nativity!". I told her I was Mary in the picture and she kept asking to see the picture of Rachel as Mary. So finally, after Christmas, I decided to be a good parent and help her dress up as Mary. You can see I didn't put a ton of effort into it, but she liked it a lot. Kids are so easy to please sometimes!

Cole was baby Jesus, of course!

Rachel also had a lot of fun making a gingerbread house.
Hmmm... I wonder if these candies taste as good as they look?
Yes they do!
All done. That was fun and delicious!
Cole liked looking at the Christmas Day snow.

Christmas pj's (one of my favorite things about Christmas). Something about the red eye flash on our camera makes Cole close his eyes almost every time! It's driving me crazy, but the camera is relatively new, so what can you do?
Christmas exhausted us, so we had a few day-after-Christmas snuggles to regain our strength.
I think Rachel got the better end of this snuggle.