Merry Christmas Eve

Our Christmas guests left very early on the 24th.  Marty was kind enough to send them off properly at 5AM but both Ali and Chris said it wasn't necessary to wake up so early and so we had a proper good bye the night before.  I ended up sleeping in until 8AM which was probably my best Christmas gift.  😄
The tradition here in Germany and with Marty's family is to have the big Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve after dinner.  When we lived in Seattle we were able to appease both sides of the family by having German Christmas at Marty's parents house in the evening of the 24th and then Santa came to our West Seattle house on Christmas morning.  When growing up we were often allowed to pick one gift to open on Christmas eve but the big celebration was always Christmas morning.  Well, we have been so busy that we hadn't even talked about how we would do Christmas this year.  We were alone- just the 4 of us- so we could do whatever we wanted.

Projection Alarm Clocks and the games Risk (Risiko - because it is the German version) and Boggle for the kids from Grandma and Papa. And very generous gift money from the Riemer side of the family.  THANK YOU!!!

We decided to stick with tradition and get the German hot dogs and potato salad for dinner (Benjamin doesn't like potato salad and Josie is a vegetarian) so it meant a bit of throwing other things together to make a meal.

Google Homes for
each of the kids

I had been so busy leading up to Christmas that not one gift was wrapped yet.  I sent the kids, Marty and Mogli on the job of going to the stores to get the food - all stores would close at 2PM on the 24th and not open again until the morning of the 27th.  In that time I was able to wrap the gifts. We didn't put any gifts under the tree this year in fear of Mogli chewing them up.
Because it gets dark so early here and we had forgotten to eat lunch our Christmas Eve dinner came around 3:30PM - right about when it was getting dark 😏
After dinner the kids opened their bigger (physically) gifts that were under the tree.  We decided to do all the stocking stuffer type gifts the next day.  It turned out being a very quiet, cozy, merry Christmas Eve. Mogli got a light up dog collar so we took him on an evening walk and then all went to bed to read books.