Christmas Eve
FUN Christmas Eve this year! This year my brilliant sister came up with an idea to do a homemade gift exchange. We drew names and the rest was history. Everyone was thrilled with excitement and anticipation to see what the gift giver had come up with. It was great! Everyone got really creative and the gifts turned out to be awesome! Here are some pics....

This is my dad's feeble attempt to get thrown out of the stake presidency...ha ha ha
Nice KEG dad!

Ty drew out Dayt and made him a microphone stand to play guitar AND sing at the same time when playing Rockband! We ALL love it and have put it to good use! You can't have a cool mic stand like that without guitar hero Aerosmith! We better go get that!

Brady had Jantzen. He took Candyland and recreated all the characters to be people in our family - so clever! The players in the game are not green, yellow, red and blue, they all have pics of Jantz, Josh, Abby and Hailee! All the characters on the board and playing cards have been replaced with all of the members of our entire family - even baby Jake. SOOOOO cute! The kids LOVE LOVE LOVE playing with it. I will have to take some more pictures of the actual game.

Carly had Josh and must have slaved over this awesome Chargers blanket for many hours for Josh. He sleeps with it EVERYNIGHT. In fact, last week he hauled it over to the Erikssons for a sleepover!

This is the jewelry box that Josh made for Hailee. He even used his own money to put some cute earrings, bracelet, and a necklace inside!

This is the pirate mobile that Abby made for baby Jake (I wonder how old he will be before we start just calling him Jake!) He has a pirate room and no mobile above his crib so we thought we could melt the two into one. The little things that hang all have to do with pirates - chest, parrot, hat, sword, ship etc. It turned out really cute - I think Ty looks excited!

Kelsey used all of her old dress up and some of her dancing outfits and accessories to make this cute dress up box for Abby, Abby's friends will have a great time with some of those outfits!

Abby couldn't wait to try a little something on!

Krista also made a magnet board for me for my mudroom. I will have to take a picture when I get it all up on the wall. I know my sister likes to organize but more than that - she LOVES to organize others and I can always use help in that area!

I thought it was so much fun this year to make homemade gifts. I know that my kids as well as Dayt and I really spent a lot of time trying to think of something the other would love, or could really use - and isn't THAT really what christmas should be about. I mean, not necessarily about gift giving, but more about thinking about others and giving of your time more than just running out and buying something on their list? I don't know, I just loved the different feeling everyone had this year. I thought it was the best Christmas Eve we've ever had. Gifts just meant so much more this year! And that's my two cents - I say thumbs up for next year!