Christmas 2007

Christmas in the extended Wyatt family has always been a big deal. When it was just the 4 of us, (Mother, Daddy, Me & Tori), we would always get to open one gift on Christmas eve. That gift was always pajamas. For many years I wished that I would get to open a toy or something funner than pajamas but then my mom told us that she wanted us to have our brand new pajamas on so that we would look nice in the pictures she took of us on Christmas morning. I thought that sounded like a pretty sensible idea and thus looked forward to my new pjs every Christmas eve. But as I look back at old Christmas pictures I can't say that the brand new pjs enhanced our Christmas morning beauty even one iota. I see picture after picture of Tori with her bed head hair do and me with puffy eyes. Perhaps we should have worn our pjs on our heads?

Now that our extended family includes in laws and out laws we have done away with the one gift apiece rule for Christmas eve and now we have a complete and total gift giving orgy. We've had to move our Christmas celebration to my sister's house because we can no longer fit in my mom's living room. The last time we tried this the gifts filled up the entire room before they were unwrapped and only 6 out of the 15 of us got to sit on furniture. It wasn't pretty.

I used to simply love to wrap Christmas gifts. I would spend a lot of time and put in a lot of effort to get the prettiest paper and make the most exquisite hand made bows. I would always pick a theme with my gifts and wrapping and I was just thisshort of being the Martha Stewart of gift wrapping. As Tori's kids got old enough I would have them come over to my house for the day and we would have great fun going on a covert mission to make something by hand for them to give to their mom & dad. I would make origami boxes for the smaller gifts, create designs out of ribbons instead of just tying a bow on a box. It. Was. Fabulous.

Somewhere along the line I ran out of time for all of that. This year I felt that I had really accomplished something when I took all of the price tags off of the gifts! Nothing had ribbon on it and I only applied bows to the gifts once I got them to my sister's house. (the bows wound up smashed anyway.) I was feeling kinda bad for my lapse in creating gift wrapping master pieces until everyone started to open their gifts.

There might as well have been a man in a black and white striped shirt with a whistle standing in the middle of the room............

"Gentlemen..Start..Your..Unwrapping!!!!

TTTWWWWWEEEEEEEEETTTTTTTT!!!! (that's a whistle being blown..)

In a little over 10 minutes the kids had unwrapped probably 30 gifts each. They wouldn't have cared if their gifts were wrapped inside of Faberge' eggs. This is a true example of "it's what's inside that counts".

We've all been vaccinated for the "stuffgrowingoutofyourhead" virus but a few of us must need a second dose. Jakey must need a couple of extra doses:



The tush behind Jake belongs to his big brother Andrew. Believe it or not he wears his pants like that on purpose.

For Christmas the kids got everything they could have possibly wanted. Jake got pirate gear, Hannah got a portable dvd player, Bek got fancy schmancy jeans and a Guitar Hero, Andrew got a gift card for CostCo, and Paul got a cell phone.

I got a beautiful framed picture of my dad that was photographed in 1978. It was one of the last known pictures of my dad with hair. This was taken when he went on a drum corps tour with my sister. When he got home from this romp through hell...all of his hair fell out and never grew back.

I also got a new frying pan and pajamas. I don't think I've ever had a Christmas in my life that I didn't get new pajamas. I got an iTunes gift card, a wool sweater, a Japanese cup with a pink kitty on it and Japanese accouterments. It was a spectacular Christmas and it was made even more spectacular a couple of days later when my mom and I left for a trip to Hawaii.