Christmas with the Stockemer's

 For round two of the Christmas festivities we had Christmas Eve dinner with Matt's family at his parent's house.  Stacey always does a beautiful job of decorating her house and making a delicious meal for the family to enjoy together.  We weren't very on the ball about taking pictures on Christmas Eve, but I'll share a few of the ones we did manage to take.

 Very picturesque, isn't it?

 Melanie wearing the dancing/musical elf hat that was to be worn by the person distributing the gifts.

 Before leaving we didn't talk to the girls at all about getting gifts that night, they just knew we were giving gifts to our family members and they were very excited about that.  I had let Melanie help me wrap gifts (pick out what paper to wrap a gift with, choose the ribbon/bow, hold her finger so I could tie the ribbons, etc.) and she remembered which gift went to which family member based on this and was quite excited to help them unwrap their gifts,

that is until she realized there were gifts there for her and then she quickly changed gears.  

Oh well.  It was nice while it lasted.

 As is typical with our girls, everything comes to a standstill when they get a new book.

As many of you know, Matt and I really enjoy cooking, and Alton Brown's show Good Eats is a show we enjoy watching on YouTube from time to time (since we don't have cable).  Matt's sister Katie got him the books of the early and middle years of the show and I think he was pretty excited about them.  They're huge books, like text books really.  And to up the coolness quotient even more, the dust jacket folds out into a poster.  Score!  

(My wonderful husband acquiesced to my request that he pose for a picture with the poster.  He's pretty great in my opinion.)