Twas the Night Before Christmas

Another Christmas has come and gone! When I was little it felt like Christmas took fooreeevverrr to get here, and now that I'm older it sneaks up on me too quickly! I was sad to take all the decorations down today and move the tree outside.

I shed a tear.

Just kidding.

But I was sad.

And I would like to proudly announce that we did not have any Christmas ornament casualties from wagging lab tails knocking them off the tree (we may have lost one...or two...or a handful last year). After learning the hard way, the bottom quarter of the tree has been established as the "Caution! Tail-wagging zone." "Hang ornament at your own risk."

Anyway, it was another great Christmas and what was even better this year was my cousin Brian and his wife Amy and their family came out and surprised us for our Christmas Eve party! We hadn't seen them in years and since they weren't able to make it out to our wedding, they hadn't even met Nate yet! 

Christmas Eve has always been the big shin-dig in my family more than Christmas day ever has. We cook lots of shrimp, eat lots of shrimp...rinse and repeat! 

And my favorite part of the night (besides all the shrimp) is our Christmas trivia game. The past several years we've been playing with prizes, and this year we had an array of food prizes! My mom, moderator extrordinaire, poses the Christmas trivia and whoever answers correctly gets to pick a prize; and from there the rules are pretty much that of a white elephant game: prizes can be stolen, 2 questions correct and you can freeze your prize, etc. etc.

And this years' game was pretty competitive.

  Throughout the duration of our trivia we learned that Sandy has a severe, and seemingly unjustified distaste for Frosty the snowman, Audrey's answer for each question is "Hark the Herald Angel's Sing!", Nate knows all the Grinch questions (coincidence??), and daddy needs to seriously hone his refereeing skills (sorry daddy, someone's gotta say it).

There was a serious battle for the bag of peanut M&M's between father and son that may or may not have left Brian sleeping on the floor for the remainder of their vacation...I'm just sayin'...I don't really know how that car ride was on the way home. Audrey tried to hide her box of Sun Chips underneath a blanket and she STILL got jacked. I ended up with a tub of Blue Bell cherry vanilla ice cream, which was DE-LISH by the way, but what I really wanted to do was steal my cousin Craig's movie-food prize with popcorn and movie candy. However, I decided against it after I sensed Craig was in an emotionally unbalanced state after he realized my mom didn't make any Maple Nut Goodie Bars this year. He made it clear to everyone that the Maple Nut Goodie Bars were in fact, NOT there and they indeed SHOULD HAVE BEEN. So to steal a man's prize out from under him, on top of the lack of Maple Nut Goodie bars would be what I would call cruel and unusual punishment.

You're welcome.

After trivia finally ended (not to worry, no one ended up in tears) we got to show the rest of the family how family picture taking is done.

Observe: 

Big arms

Show me your jump shot

Show me your mug shot

Sniff-the-pit

*In addition to our Christmas trivia, we have each person bring 3 personal questions about themselves so we can learn more about each other. This year, we learned that Sandy's celebrity crush is Tim Tebow...so this one is for Sandy =)

"Make it as difficult as possible for anyone to get up!"-Daddy

I was sitting on Nate's lap and I'm pretty sure he literally stood straight up and dumped me on top of my dad. ...I suppose he was simply following directions.

I bet Brian and Amy don't get family pics like this in Michigan...they should probably just come out to Arizona more often for Christmas time cough cough, wink wink, Bob's your uncle.