The day BEFORE Christmas ...

You'd think I would have snapped a shot of our beautiful 22# turkey when it first came out of the oven all brown and beautiful ... but I forgot! However, this is Sabrina de-boning "Gussie" (what we named our turkey). We decided on a turkey dinner for Christmas Eve and then a ham dinner for Christmas Day.
And here is a shot of the "kitchen fairy" as I am oftentimes called by Mr. Jones. He thinks naming me a fantasy name gets him out of doing any cleaning around here ... (because I am also referred to as "the cleaning fairy," "the cooking fairy," etc.)
But when I think of a fairy, Karis Danielle is who comes to mind. Here is our pixie girl waking up from her afternoon nap on the Eve of Christmas ...
Adam, Emily and baby Jeremiah joined us later in the afternoon. I loved these snapshots of Olivia holding Jeremiah and I couldn't pick which one to post ... but out of the dozen or so that were taken, I did narrow it down to just three!

Olivia is very good at handling babies ... she is fourteen now and practically a lady! She was only seven years old the very first Christmas she came to our house. These seven years have gone by very very quickly.
Sabrina read a Christmas story to Karis and Jackson. It was nice and cozy in our front room with the fire burning ...
I told you I would show you where I hung the beautiful Christmas pictures the kiddos painted ~ I think their art work made our living room extra special for Christmas.
The Rauch family opens up one gift on Christmas Eve. This year, Sabrina got all of the kiddos a new set of jammies to snuggle up in ...
Karis was very happy with her little owl pj's ...

And Jackson thought his pair was pretty cool too ...
Olivia wouldn't let us snap a picture of her modeling her pj's ... but that's OK because we've been able to take many beautiful pictures of Olivia in the last few days.

And here we are feasting on our turkey and stuffing ... I'm posting this picture of Sabrina because she was cracking everyone up with her poses ...
Adam and Emily came AFTER our turkey meal, and baby Jeremiah was sleeping soundly in his car seat when they arrived.
Grandpa Jones had lots of grandbaby "fixes" but was VERY reluctant to let Jeremiah get very far from his sight.
This is SO cute of these two girls! There isn't any definite order to these pictures, I'm just going to let them speak for themselves for the most part ...

We had fun visiting with everyone, cleaned up the kitchen, and got ready to go to the Christmas Eve service over at church ...
We sang all of the beautiful traditional Christmas carols of old, heard the Christmas story read from Scripture, sang "Silent Night" by candlelight ...

All of the little children were called to the front of the church to hear a beautiful story read, "The Tale of Three Trees." This is one of my favorite stories ever ~ I have this book at my house, sitting on Dylan's piano. I read it last year at Christmas to Emma, Christopher, and Matthew. I always think of them when I hear it and remember how much they love this story ~ I think Karis and Jackson enjoyed it too ... can you see them in the picture?
As I sat through the service that was so worshipful and beautiful, I was SO thankful Christ had come at such a cost for all of us. It was especially wonderful to share this evening with dear family, and for the first time ... baby Jeremiah!