The Christmas post

Let's pretend I'm not months behind on these pictures, shall we?
On Christmas Eve we took the kids the Children's Christmas Eve (whatever it's called) at Duke Chapel. It wasn't a mass, but they read parts from the bible and we sang lots of songs etc. Kids got to choose whether they would dress up as an angel or a shepherd. We had three angels kids dressed up as angels, whose behavior did not reflect their halos.

Chad was there too, but not in any of the pictures.
We then came home and made our gingerbread houses!

Natalie's house. Her overuse of frosting made for an unstable house.

Chad's

The bottle of red cookie frosting was a hit until I saw Theo sucking the frosting straight out of the bottle. 

I'll be a serious contender if Food Network ever starts production on Gingerbread Wars

We didn't get our 7 fishes in this year. We had lobster mac and cheese (amazing!) and a few bonus fishies.

Then we tried to get them to pose for pictures,

prepared our offerings to Santa and the reindeer,

We continued our tradition of leaving a description of each cookie so Santa could vote for his favorite. This year, the peppermint biscotti came out on top. I agree with that assessment. Santa chose candy cane cookies last year. A pattern is developing.

And finally hung our stockings:

I took precious few pictures on Christmas morning, 

Theo would occasionally stop his present opening to look at his dragon and day, "Hi, Dragon." We named the dragon Scorch, and he is just the cutest toy we have in the house now. I may or may not sometimes stop to scratch Scorch behind the ears even when no kids are around. If I'm ever asked to choose between Fenway and Scorch, Fenway would be looking for a new home.

We made Shalane's lasagna for Christmas dinner, along with Grinch Punch:

and a fabulous log cake. 

There's Kahlua in the frosting.