Christmas with the Spence Ohana

Merry Christmas to all my blog readers! I hope and pray that y'all have a day filled with love and joy. So our kiddos decided to wake right at 7am. I told Madeline it was still dark out, she said she heard birds chirping so it's definitely morning. They were thrilled to see that Santa came and there were lots of presents under the tree!

Thanks to Pinterest I found this lovely letterhead for Santa notes. And since Madeline was questioning that Santa's writing looked a lot like mine, I thought printing these out might throw her off into "believing" in Santa at least for one more year. :)

Santa brought James and Madeline each their own Wiggle Car and a Piggy Bank. He left these notes on their gifts.

And as you can see, 

they were very happy with what Santa gave them. 

We got done with presents by 8am. Stephen had his morning coffee and bagel and I had my hot tea and my Kerstkrans specially from Holland. It's an almond paste filled puff pastry and my absolute favorite thing to eat on Christmas. The kids spent the rest of the morning playing in the wrapping paper with Penny. Checking out all their new toys. And playing out in front of our home with one of the neighbor boys.

After I had a (much needed) nice morning nap, we took the kids to our neighborhood park so they had more room to ride their Wiggle Cars. It was pretty cold out, but they had fun.

Last night on Christmas Eve we went to St. Anthony's Catholic Church for the Children's Mass. James slept the entire Mass, but Madeline really enjoyed watching the other kids act out the story about the birth of Jesus. She played the part of an Angel last year, but this year we couldn't make it to the practices so she wasn't able to participate. It was a wonderful service. And the priest gave a wonderful homily, expressing what the greatest gift of all is...when Jesus gave us all eternal life, and that their is a seat available for all the Faithful in Heaven.

After Mass we had some tacos for Christmas dinner. Then the kids took a nice hot bubble bath and left some cookies and milk out for Santa. We had a wonderful Christmas and hope you did too.