My Christmas was...

...awesome!

On Wednesday, my sister from Oregon and my nephew from Oregon State Univ. drove in.  Then Thursday, my brother and his girlfriend and his son flew in...this was a complete surprise.  While we were just sitting around waiting for my nephew from Texas to get here in walks my brother too!  So awesome!

There are 5 kids in my family and 6 nieces and nephews and everyone was together this Christmas!  It was one of the best Christmas' I can remember!

Christmas Eve I spent all day cooking with my girls.  We decided that we wanted to try to make pumpkin pies straight from the pumpkin.  I went online and found the BEST recipe for this.  It actually walks you through the entire process from picking out the pumpkin to making the crust and what the knife should look like when you check if the pie is finished.  It was amazing!

It took a little longer than we had anticipated and we made two (since I have twins, everything we do is in two's).  But it was so worth it!  Keep in mind, I have NEVER even made a pie before.  Never done a crust in my life and decided to go big on the first try!  They turned out really good!  The three of us were really proud of our pies.

Then Christmas was so wonderful.  We did Christmas Eve at my sister's and Christmas at my house...mind you we live about 100 yards from each other. 

We ate at 5:00pm...and I spent the entire day baking until it was time for dinner.  This is one of my favorite parts of the holidays.  I made 2 pumpkin rolls, 2 homemade pumpkin pies, 1 chocolate mint cream cheese roll, one batch of brownies.

Santa was really good to my girls...they each got a new bike for Christmas (without training wheels) and we took them to our basketball court at our house that is fully fenced to teach them how to ride them.  It literally took them about 45 minutes to go from never riding a bike before to riding it around the court by themselves...I am still totally blown away at how quick they learned how to ride those darn bikes. 

They also got new guitars for Christmas and with our whole family sitting around they decided to put on a "Christmas show" and brought out their guitars and sang to the whole family!  Then Erynn decided to make up a song while she played her guitar and sang to everyone by herself.  SO precious!

It was an amazing day!  Everyone was happy, there was plenty of food, the games lasted until the late night and we had one of the most memorable Christmas' I can remember.  Thank you God!

I hope you all had a blessed day also...Happy New year friends!