On the 4th Day of Christmas...

Christmas Eve brought a new kind of excitement for me. In years past, I'd gone to Julie's house for Christmas. This year there were four of us at my house. Imagine Santa's excitement! I think he went shopping early for stocking-stuffers, finding cool things for us girls, and manly things for Jer. On Christmas Eve, after everyone went to bed, I was the only witness to the secret dealings of Santa Claus. He filled the stockings and laid out gifts for each person. He sneakily put presents near the tree and a Blu-Ray player and movie 'neath the tv.
I was so delighted by what I'd seen. You see, I've never been privy to the affairs of The Jolly Man himself. I was so excited for everyone to wake up and see what they got, I couldn't sleep. It has been a long time since sleep has eluded me on Christmas Eve. It was like being a kid again.
I woke up several times through the night, each time looking at the clock wondering if it was time to wake people up yet. Finally, at 7am on Christmas Day, I called Mom and Dad. They are 9 hours behind me and were just saying goodbye to people after a Christmas Eve family get-together. I wished them a merry Christmas, talked to my cousin, Melanie, and my grandma on speakerphone.
I killed more time by taking a shower, but after that, I was quite insistent that people start waking up. While they each took showers, I prepared the Christmas (turkey)roast and vegetables in the crockpot.
When everyone was ready for the day, we took our annual Christmas photo, which is always taken before discovering what Santa brought.
We opened gifts and watched each other open gifts. We enjoyed our own excitement at our new treasures as well as at each others'. There were some fun surprises, and some that moved us to happy tears. What a wonderful Christmas!
We had our traditional Christmas brunch of hot chocolate, scrambled eggs and juice (I forgot to buy the turkey bacon!); this year brought a new culinary flair: eggnog waffles! All served on Christmas dishes, of course. Not many things in this world bring such a simple happiness as eating off of Christmas dishes!
Soon it was afternoon and friends were starting to show up. We have some good, close friends here that we consider part of our extended family. We did a gift exchange and ate Christmas dinner together. My neighbor also came since he had to come back from vacation early for work and he was alone.
We ate and talked and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves into the evening. The girls (5 of us) started playing different board games. The boys (3 of them) played their new Wii games. None of us paid much attention to the time. We were all having too much fun.
Then Todd called: he is the link to Matthew (currently serving an LDS mission). It was a 3-way call only. We were sad our parents couldn't join in (they got to talk to Matt afterward) because it (the phone company? available technology?) wouldn't allow 4-way. We had such a fun time talking to him! Julie, Emily and I went upstairs and lay on my bed with the speaker phone on. We laughed a lot. It was so nice to hear Matt's voice. It was nice to hear from Todd too.
When the phone call was over, we continued playing more games into the night. It was a happy, wonderful Christmas.