Christmas Eve

During the day of Christmas Eve Claire and I made sugar cookies, and gingerbread man cookies. Dad is the only one who will eat the gingerbread cookies though. Claire is wearing her special Christmas apron that she made.
Aiden saw young Richard using my chopper thingy and freaked out. "Slap Chop!" He loves the Slap Chop infomercial guy. So he confiscated Claire's apron, made a label for the chopper, and posed for the camera.
While we were baking, a friend of mine called and informed me that he had 1000 lbs of cheese at his house that he was trying to get rid of. Aiden is always asking me to buy him block cheese. I like to buy the pre-shredded cheese that he doesn't like. So now as you can imagine, he is in hog heaven with his 42 lb block of sharp cheddar cheese. Now we have to figure out a way to cut it into 1 lb chunks. A project for another day.
In the evening we had our traditional food fest. We invited Grandma and Grandpa Hoopes down to partake. We planned to eat, and watch "A Christmas Story". Several of my kids had never seen that classic movie before.
Here is a close up of the feast. Notice the crab, shrimp, cheese fondue, and papoosas. At one point I noticed that Claire had the ring of shrimp just sitting on her lap enjoying herself. I made her put it back on the table.

After eating, but before the movie we had to play the annual Christmas bingo game. The rule is, if you get bingo you get to open one present that night.

The festivities ended around 10 pm. Little Richard invited all the kids to sleep down in the basement in his room so that they could watch videos and play on computer all night instead of sleeping. Then Richard and I began the arduous task of wrapping. We got to bed around midnight. Only to have our children come running in our room at exactly 6 am. Richard noticed something as each child entered the room and was silhouetted by the hall light. Our kids are really big. None of them are small anymore. Not even Claire Bear.