Christmas 2009: Part 1

These pictures are from the Sunday before Christmas, December 20. Our church service was amazing. One of our friends sang "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." I absolutely love that song!! The kids in our ward from Brook's singing group sang "Away in a Manger" and I sang in an acapella quartet of "The First Noel." It was beautiful. Combined with the inspirational talks from our bishopric, it was such a wonderful meeting! I left that meeting feeling so uplifted and inspired.


After church I decided to try and get some shots of my kids in their Christmas Sunday clothes. I'm posting them all because I think they are hilarious. This is how a typical Meredith children photo shoot goes. (notice all of the Sean-isms. He is at the stage where he has no idea how to smile a "real" smile)

For Christmas eve, we had our usual ham dinner with my mom's potato salad and my famous rolls. mmm... I am happy to report that I FINALLY successfully made my mom's potato salad, after 8 years. Go me. The problem was (I say to make myself feel better) that the recipe she gave me 8 years ago isn't the one she actually uses! It's the one she "starts" with, but she always does a ton of stuff different. Well last year, she and my Grandma put together a family favorites cookbook that had the recipe with all of her tweakings in it. Success!

We had our awesome Ridgecrest neighbors and Jeremy's brother and family over. It was fun!

As always, we read the real Christmas story from Luke 2, and did our nativity play. Addison was Joseph, but he kept stealing baby Jesus out of the manger because he wanted to hold him, which incensed Mary (Liah) quite a bit. Emily was an angel. Sean was a shepherd and Michael was his sheep. (We always did this growing up at my Grandma's house. With so many grandchildren, we had to get pretty creative with roles in the Christmas play!)


Coming soon: Christmas 2009: Part 2