Pre-Christmas Traditions in Pasco

My family has a lot of fun traditions surrounding Christmas time.  We really just enjoy spending as much time together as possible, especially since everybody from Utah was able to come to Pasco as well this year.  That made this Christmas break extra fun.  There are too many pictures for just one blogpost.  So this will be the pre-Christmas pictures.  More will come later.

We made Christmas ornaments this year by taking empty ornaments and filling them with paint and swirling the paint around.  It is a fun project because you never know what it will look like at the end.  I asked Whitney what color she wanted to use and she said 'brown'.  I was able to convince her to also put some blue into the ornament.  Of course, the project took longer than the attention span of a toddler, so her ornament wasn't finished.  But that's okay.  There ended up being some really pretty ornaments made.

We also decorated some gingerbread men cookies.

The gingerbread man in the middle is Whitney's.  She really liked being able to choose whatever candy she wanted to place on it.

And Whitney does a little taste-testing of the frosting to make sure it wasn't poisonous or anything like that.  Once she tried the frosting, the cookie-decorating came to a stand-still.

Every year my family goes to the Griggs All-Night Sale.  There are auctions for cheaper items and blue-light specials and fun things to do.  We always set up a table and chairs to play games.  This year, for the first time that anyone recalls, there was a Santa for the children.  So we took a couple of pictures with us and Santa.

Whitney loved  the little "reindeer"; which was a really cute baby goat.

I didn't think we would get a picture of Rachel sitting on Santa's lap this year because she was born so soon to Christmas.  But I am really happy that Santa showed up at Griggs so we could get a couple of pictures with him.

It was too cold to take baby Rachel ding-dong-ditching, so she and I stayed home.  But Will took Whitney with the rest of my family out to deliver some goodies to some families.  It is hard to tell in this bottom picture, but that is Will holding Whitney and coming back from a house after dropping off some treats.  Of course, we all enjoyed eating the extra treats after coming home.

Finally, here are two pictures of us getting ready for the Nativity Story.  Our family always acts it out every year and every year we just have a grand time.  My mom always tapes it for us.  Sometimes it gets a little crazy.

Will and Rachel and I ended up being Joseph and Mary and Baby Jesus (I'll give you three guesses on who was who).  We didn't get any pictures of us, oh well.  Acting out the Nativity Story was still really fun. 

So we had lots of fun in Pasco.  Stay tuned for our next blog to see us on Christmas day.