Christmas Eve

This year’s Christmas has been a long time coming. We’ve been anticipating it for longer than we normally do. We started preparing activities for our Advent Calendar in early November, did all our Christmas shopping early, had the tree up and decorated before Thanksgiving… we just couldn’t wait for the good ole Bullard Christmas to begin. As for the festivities, they kicked off on Christmas Eve. Several of our friends stayed in Cambridge this year, which made for a very merry time. We made a huge crock pot (make that two crock pots) full of beef stew, with cornbread and homemade eggnog, for Christmas Eve. We made some snickerdoodles and chex mix just to have something to snack on.

Here’s Asher helping with the baking prep…

For dessert on Christmas Eve, we made these really fun Santa hat cheesecake bites. They were DELICIOUS. It would break your heart if I told you how good the cheesecake was. It was our first ever baked cheesecake; a milestone for the Bullards.

One of the highlights of Christmas Eve for me is getting to read the Christmas story. I have a great big Christmas story book that my mom always read to us growing up. She got my brother and me a copy a couple of years ago so we could read it with our families as well. Asher didn’t make it through the whole story, but that’s alright.

When Asher was finished with the first Christmas story book, we switched to his “touchy feely” nativity book, which has furry donkeys and textured blankets for the baby Jesus. The rendition of the story isn’t quite as good, the shepherds bring Jesus a little lamb, which I thought was weird, and the prose is not nearly as beautiful as the KJV. I guess the “touchy feely” part only goes for the animals, not for the story. In any case, Asher liked it just fine. And, by the way, check out the hair on this kid! We just can’t bring ourselves to get the first hair cut!

After getting Asher and his friend Paxton down for the night, dinner was devoured and then the party really got started. One group set up camp in the kitchen to work on a Christmas puzzle (this is one crazy group of Ph.D. students, don’t you know) and the other half of us sprawled out in the living room for a lively viewing of the Grinch. It was a low-key, stress-free Christmas Eve with our friends. Perfect.