Bedtime on Christmas Eve

Ok, so I've been saving this story up since I started my blog to share with you. I've got to preface this by saying a year before, my mom, my husband and I went outside the windows of my sisters house and my mom said "Ho Ho Ho" I think she was supposed to sound like Santa. My husband and I had to do everything in our power not to laugh so hard that the boys heard us because it was so funny a Santa sound. That was two years ago. Ok, so last year, my oldest nephew was 6 and they lived next door to my parents. It was Christmas Eve. My dad was working. The boys had spent the day down at Mom's with us, and from breakfast, the guys had been checking on Santa's progress as he made his way around the globe. Everything was going well until about 7 o'clock. That's when Santa made it to North America. Now, when you are 6, you don't have too great a concept of distance, the only thing you know is that you are supposed to be asleep or Santa won't come. So, we are having fun sitting around when my husband says, "Hey, Santa's getting close, he's in New York." If you've ever wanted to see two little boys go from hyperactive to traumatized in an instant, that is the sentence that did it. He's close, how close is that. Panic sets in because they are at Grandma's wide awake and not at home asleep. A geography lesson of how Santa had to cover the east coast and south America too, using anything we could find as a globe, and the boys tried to act brave but you could tell they were worried. So we decided we would have to call Santa to confirm that the boys had at least an hour before he would be arriving. Remember my dad, who is working at this time and doesn't have a clue about the events that have taken place. The kids are sitting right there, we couldn't explain to him what was going on, but when he answered the cell phone, Grandma said, "Hi Santa" initiating the conversation. Luckily "Santa" caught on very quickly and put on his Santa voice to talk to the boys and assure them they had time to get to sleep although they shouldn't wait too long. So, confident that Santa wasn't going to miss them, they headed home, and along the way the 6 year old said, "You know, Santa sounded a lot like Grandpa, but different. He didn't sound sick like he did last year." Oh, the innocence of children.

Yes, Santa did arrive with lots of gifts!

And yes, they do realize that Christmas is really about Jesus. We were going to Silver Dollar City three years ago on Christmas and talking about what we were celebrating and Blaine wanted to know why we celebrated for so long and everyone put up all the lights. Then he said he knew why. It was because it was Jesus's birthday and since He was God's son we needed to celebrate it for a whole month and that was why we did everything we did in December.

What will this year bring? I guess all we can do is wait and see!