Christmas Eve at the Goodales

Ahhhhh... I love Christmas. And Christmas traditions! Every Christmas Eve we:

• Read the story of the birth of Jesus Christ from Luke 2 in the New Testament.
• Read "The Night Before Christmas."
• Put out all the baby Jesus figures in our nativities. Michelle collects nativity sets and we have them all over our house at Christmas. We pretty much collect only nativity sets where the baby Jesus is not attached to the manger's bed. When Michelle served a mission in France, she noticed that they did not put in the baby Jesus in the nativities until Christmas Eve, and this is a tradition we have kept in our home.
• Put out milk and cookies for Santa.
• And finally, our kids get to open a gift, and it's never a surprise. Every Christmas Eve our kids get a new pair of pajamas. The first picture you see here is of our kids in their new PJs by our Christmas tree.

This year we also did something new. For the first time (I think), we all stood around the piano with Brianna playing, and sang Christmas carols. It was a lot of fun. You see a pic of us below, and there are more online (here on Facebook, and here on Flickr).