Christmas Eve

My favorite day of the year - Christmas Eve Eve - We had family over for dinner, cookie baking and some last minute Christmas tasks.

After dinner we got right into cookie baking - this year Tatum did most of the cookie cutting and he had a great time doing it.

Once we finished up, Derek and I quickly got our cinnamon rolls ready for the next day, Bernard was ready for his goodbye and we started Christmas Vacation.

Tatum woke up ready for Santa on Christmas Eve morning - he kept looking out windows to see if he could see him.  We did our traditional breakfast of cinnamon rolls to start the day.

In a new tradition, we still had Tatum's Santa costume from last Halloween and I'd made some little cinnamon bread loaves the day before so we let Tatum deliver them to neighbors - it was one of the highlights of the day - he had so much fun and we had fun watching him do it.

On a whim I'd seen that some families say you can touch the elf on Christmas Eve only so we let Tatum do that and he was so excited (he even packed him in a basket to bring to Christmas Eve dinner).

Since everything in our area was shut down that meant no dinner out and no church in person on Christmas Eve which was very weird.  We went over for a pasta dinner at my parents house and watched church via zoom on the tv.

As soon as church was over we were on our way back home to try to get to bed early (even though that never happens on Christmas Eve).  We had the most awful rain storm going on but bundled up for Tatum to leave reindeer food outside.

To finish off the night it was the usual Christmas Eve routine - pajamas, leaving out cookies for Santa, The Night Before Christmas, a little bit of a movie and then off to bed for our little guy so Santa could come.