A lovely Christmas.

We had a wonderful Christmas. Christmas eve my family (Aillons) came over and we had dinner at our house. This year I've got some of those English crackers for the table and is really fun to open them and have jokes around the table. Afterwards we kept our Aillon family tradition and went to the Mesa Temple Christmas lights.

Then we went back to mom and dad's house and had a fire in their fireplace at their new house.

Christmas morning Hunter and I opened presents together. Which I must say is so wonderful.  I love that our family's schedules work out that we can have that special time together to be our own family on Christmas morn.  It's one of my favorite times all year with Hunter.   Hunter always wins when it comes to gift giving.  We each sneak out of bed in the middle of the night to set up Christmas.  And we both pretend that we didn't hear the other.  It's cute.

Then we packed the car with all of our gifts went to breakfast at my parents house and had gift opening with them.

 We gave Todd a cash basket.

My dad is really into guns lately.

Hunter got spoiled and got a huge compressor.   And I got my prize- a new iPad on which I am blogging from right now.

Delicious breakfast and lots of fun with the Aillons. We went back home packed up our next car and went over to the Garners for their gift exchange.

Every year I'm still surprised at how many presents hunters mom seems to get under that Christmas tree. But I guess with nine kids and nine grandkids there's going to be a lot of presents.

Hunter got a really cute onesie from his secret Santa.

I was spoiled with some homemade gifts from Heidi and then a wonderful assortment of cookbooks.
And our favorite gift from his parents was a new Dutch oven.

We had another great meal with them- lasagna, cheese and meat platter, pasta and an amazing salad.

After many fun hours with the Garners we headed home and got ready for our annual Christmas hot cocoa party.The hot cocoa party has become ours and many other friends and family's favorite tradition. Except I have no tradition of taking pictures at this party.  ;-(  boo

I just love Christmas and this year was especially wonderful. Everyone got along and we had lots of good food, presents and laughter.

I've had an especially good time the last few weeks physically and Spiritually preparing for Christmas and it really paid off I hope I do this every year.

Here are some last shots of the 2 hour long gift opening at the Garners: