Crazy Days of Christmas

 We put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving as is tradition in our house.  Just like last year, we cheated and used my three piece pre-lit tree that pops up in just a few minutes.  (My mom has a nicer/bigger one, but you have to sort the branches and put them in individually and then put the lights on and it can take forever.)  We waited until the last minute to put gifts under the tree.  We kept them in the play pen so they would not get bugged.  Once presents were out, we put up a guard chicken.  You don't have a guard chicken?  Well, you need one.  Lee was holding Kim and showing her pieces of the nativity, and me, being the horrible mother that I am from time to time, scared Kim by making a loud noise when she went to touch the chicken.  This resulted in her being afraid of it so this is what we put in front of our monstrous stack of presents:

 On a side note, she is even more terrified of Mike from Monsters, Inc. for the same reason.  We got tired of her shutting off the computer while we were using it, so he guards the on/off switch:

 Since we were doing Christmas with seven adults and six children, and Christmas fell on a Sunday this year where church started at 9, we cheated and did Christmas a day early.  We took the kids to see the lights around town while Grandpa and Grandma played Santa.  Here's the note they found on the door upon returning home:

 Opening presents at our house was crazy pandemonium.  Rather than hang a bunch of individual socks, we decided to just do one REALLY big sock:

 Kim was only about 5 days old last Christmas, so she got into it a little bit more this year:

 The bigger girls had no trouble jumping into the unwrapping festivities:

 Grandpa being goofy:

(I got a good gift for him this year...I try to go for the comic value of a gift when shopping for him.  As a child he had a sock monkey so his gift from me this year was a 4 foot tall sock monkey!)

 Traditional pictures of the Christmas Gifts (Which I claim are nice when your sister tries to claim something as hers in later years...you have proof that it was yours)

 Taylor:

 Kadie:

 And Kim:

 Hope you all had a Merry Christmas.