For what it could be we had a lovely little Christmas. We wanted to be mindful of Covid-19 especially with my parents who are higher risk.

Even without all of our traditional activities the kids kept us smiling and seeing the magic of the season.

They really seemed to “get” Santa this year and loved following our two “elf on the shelfs” around the house.

We wrapped way too many presents. We have been trying to buy the kids less at Christmas time because they can get overwhelmed but with Covid it was easy to just keep buying them things, online shopping in sweatpants instead of going to Christmas parties.

We went on our traditional Christmas Eve hike. Cannon has been asking a lot to go into the mountains so we made sure to find a place that felt like the mountains, without being too far from home.

Eldorado Canyon did not disappoint! We spent the rest of the day eating yummy foods and the kids got to open one gift.

We woke up to excited little kids on Christmas morning. They were ready to see if Santa had come. Cannon and Emmy were excited to see that the cookies and milk they left out were gone and presents were left.

We start by allowing them to open the gifts in their stockings then we eat breakfast.

We had our traditional Monkey Bread and scrambled eggs.

Then it was time to open gifts. At ages two and four the kids are more into playing with the toys as they open them rather than opening all the gifts so after a couple of hours we only had half the gifts open.

For lunch we went to my parents house. We were so lucky to have a nice warm sunny day. We had Christmas on their deck with more delicious food. In my immediate family we have four dogs so they were loving seeing each other and playing outside. My parents made it special by decorating and even made a cardboard sleigh for the kids to play in.

We really wanted to see my parents and my brother and felt that an outdoor gathering was the safest decision. Cory’s immediate family lives in the Northwest so we don’t normally see them anyway. We are long overdue for a visit but our summer plans to travel were cancelled this year (fingers crossed for summer 2021).

The rest of the day was spent playing with new toys and watching Soul on Disney+ (highly recommend).

While it was not the Christmas I thought we would have, it was still good. Full of joy and love.

I hope your day, whatever it looked like included love and joy.