Christmas in November

My Mom is a woman who loves to plan and entertain. Each year she comes up with a theme for Christmas. Since all the Briggs siblings were together, my mom decided to do all of our Christmas Eve traditions in November, which was fine by all of us. Kimball was eager to help grandma Briggs decorate her Christmas tree :)

  

The final product – Glorious!

Obviously, the theme this year had to do with stars. If you look closely at the center of the table, you will notice a Ken & Barbie doll together. Any guesses?

The theme was “Dancing with the Stars”. After a beautiful and delicious dinner, we all learned how to do the “swing” from a "Dancing with the Stars” workout video. I got some pretty good videos of mostly everyone participating. I will definitely have to post all my videos sometime, but I can’t guarantee that they will be up by the end of this year :)

My mom always gave us pajamas on Christmas Eve growing up and that is something that lives on. All the girls had dancing monkey one piece feet fleece pajamas (Kevin’s favorite ;)

We all gathered around the table to get the gift card game started! One of my favorite traditions :) that was started several years back with a “New York” themed Christmas. Just to refresh your memory, we all take turns rolling dice and if you get a seven or eleven, you get to choose a gift card from the middle or steal from someone else. We skyped Kevin in for this game, he would roll and tilt the camera down to show what it was, so that we knew he wasn’t saying 7 or 11 everyone. Not that Kevin would cheat or anything, we all just thought it was funny.

After the gift card game, we all watched a church video (can’t remember which one) but the one that shows the events of Jesus Christ's birth. This helps us to get our thoughts focused on the true meaning of Christmas after all the other fun traditions. After we watch the video, we have a family testimony hour, where we each have an opportunity to share our testimony with everyone. I love this part because I was strengthened by the testimonies given by family about our Savior, Jesus Christ. This really helped to kick off the Christmas Season with the right spirit.

My parents had one family gift for each family. We all opened them and found that we all received a Bose sound dock, since the theme is Dancing with the Stars, we all needed something to play music on at home and dance to :) Since, being home, I have listened to it every day! Thanks mom & dad!

Kimball opened up her gifts from grandma & grandpa, she got a cute outfit, a book & color form sticker toy. She couldn’t wait to read the book :)

 

Uncle Sam & Aunt Lindsay were very sweet in getting a gift for Kimball. She loved pulling the tissue paper out of the bag. Thank you Lindsay & Sam for the animal hand puppets & coloring book! Kimball loves them!

We had a great time and are so grateful for the time spent on making everything nice and that we were able to spend time with the family in California. We are grateful to celebrate our Savior this holiday season.