It's never too late to post your holiday photos: Christmas Edition

Well, maybe it is too late but I am doing it anyway.

Santa tried to help me get baby to look at the camera.

Since my husband is an eternal Ph.D. student at the U, we get free tickets to Pioneer Theater.  Here we are at "Elf" (obviously).

Speaking of free entertainment, here I am with my mom and daughter at a King's Singers/MoTab concert.

While decorating the tree, my three-year-old wore the name tag he got camping the previous summer and announced that he wanted "to go to the hills and do the camping."

Here is my lovely niece preparing for Christmas Eve dinner at my mom's house.

My son saw these enormous wrapped presents at my mom's house and asked to be photographed with them.  He had never seen such a thing before because his own parents are too lazy to wrap gifts that are too big to fit in gift bags.

My parents have about a zillion nativities out at Christmas.  When my oldest was a baby, I gave them this fisher price nativity to keep in the lowest nativity nook, in the hopes that my daughter would play with that instead of all of the much more breakable ones.  It has been a hit with all the babies ever since.

Enjoying the lights at Temple Square.

My 3-year-old was in his refusing-to-wear-long-pants phase at that time.  I tried to coax him into snow pants for the chilly Temple Square visit, but I failed.

We gave the kids a new play room for Christmas, made from a small cement-walled room in the basement that used to be a coal room.  I took the kids with me to the store to get paint color samples.  My kids love paint color samples, so they grabbed a bunch too, including some really crazy colors.  At home, I divided the samples into two groups, "Maybe" and "No."  I asked my two oldest for their opinions on the colors in the maybe pile and they vehemently disagreed with each other, which is typical.  Then my husband walked in, picked up a fluorescent green sample from the no pile and said, "I like this one" and both children were suddenly in complete agreement.  So I worked long hours to paint a room--with several shelves--a hideous shade of fluorescent green.  Here is my son in front of the magnet board in the room, with magnets my sister gave the kids for Christmas to go with the new magnet board.