It was a great holiday!

We had a really nice Christmas this year. We spent Christmas Eve at Joe's parents' house and his Mom was discharged from the hospital just in time to spend the holidays at home, which was really great. We munched on a wonderful buffet of goodies and kept our annual tradition of watching at least one full run of The Christmas Story movie marathon.

Christmas day was at our house with my brother and his family, my Mom, and my sister-in-law's parents. We had a nice dinner on the back patio (the weather was great here in AZ) and then opened gifts.

Here's Joe helping the girls open one of their gifts Christmas morning.



The most played with gift of the night was this silly frame thingy with plastic pins that mold to the shape of whatever you push into it. Here's Katie & Emily molding their dramatic and silly poses.



Lucy was a little freaked out by all the commotion and planted herself to the side of Jim's leg for the second half of the gift opening.



Check out the cool gift my Mom gave me. It's a Mandarin Chinese travel pack which includes books and a CD with words and phrases, dictionary, menu reader, emergency expressions, etc. It will be nice to hear the pronunciations of the words on CD.



I hope everyone had a great holiday this year!