Christmas 2020

These pictures could not be more out of order, but I'm too lazy to organize them.  So!  I'll do my best to describe them as they come.  These first two are on Christmas Eve.  We booked the lake to go skating.  We used to be able to just show up, but because of the Covid restrictions, we have to book in advance and can only stay for an hour.  We also have to stay with just our family (no meeting with other friends).  An hour was perfect for our family though!  Skating is one of my favourite things to do over the holidays and we had the best weather for it.

This is after Christmas.  "Cards Against Humanity - Family Edition" was easily the fav game of the season for us.  Lots of fart jokes.

And this was the day we put up the tree (I believe it was the second week of November).  Jane LOVES this little town and was playing with all of the ornaments like they were dolls.  It was pretty cute. A very magical day when Christmas goes up.

Puzzle contest!  We had a boys against girls contest to see whose team could put their puzzle together the fastest.  The girls and I were a little too busy wrapped up in singing along with the Christmas songs to be fast.  Tee hee!  

And what is Christmas without decorating gingerbread houses?  I've been buying two lately because there just enough room on one house for our entire family to participate.

Ellie could have used a house of her own.  Yes, these are tears due to Jane "wrecking" everything.  My little perfectionist daughter could not handle our house having a few creative-Jane elements.  She also could not handle Joe and I trying to make her laugh and swiftly went to her room to cry.  So.  Like I said, every single family event?  Tears.  Ellie was just taking her turn.

Jolly Holly was feeling a little creative this year and wanted to try a few new and exciting places to hide or make us laugh.  Again, these are not in order and are scattered throughout this post... so.

I forced the kids to watch a little bit of a project I had worked on this year.  Not anything I wrote, but I was hired as a Music Director for an animated local project called, "Nutty C and The Perfect Tree."  It was a good experience considering the restrictions and limited ability to be on stage together.  We also had some insane timelines to reach.  I'm not sure the producer was 100% happy with how things turned out but we all still had a good attitude about it.  For me, it was more about creating memories and enjoying a new experience.  Jane and Jackson humoured me by watching a few minutes of it.  Jane liked it!  Haha!

One of many puzzles we pulled out this Christmas!  Harry Potter!

This was my favourite Jolly Holly moment of the season.  Haha!   Our Harry Potter advent calendar characters attacked JH!

It's another holiday!  More sugar cookies!

More skating.  I think this was our first time out.  Joe wasn't able to come due to work, but it was pretty manageable.  Actually, I'm pretty sure Jane cried for half of it because she just wanted to go fast!  Zoe and Ellie were so patient with her and kind considering the amount of screaming that came out of her!  "I wasn't that fast either when I first learned how to skate, too!"  Very sweet.  An hour was plenty of time for our family!  We all survived it and everyone helped out!  Jane wasn't a total disaster the entire time.  It was generally really fun actually.  But I DO think I was having one of those days where nothing could get me down!  Not even a screaming Jane.

We got a DUMP of snow.  And I'm so happy we did because with all of these restrictions, we were running out of ideas of how to spend our time as a family.  There are only so many puzzles and board games you can play!  Here we are digging tunnels.

This is Christmas Eve.  Zoe and Jane (mostly Zoe) helping to make a veggie-platter masterpiece for dinner!

Christmas Eve PJ's.  We just finished doing the Nativity where Jane wore a red blanket.  When we asked her who she was dressing up as, she said, "I'm an evil angel."  Hmm.  What Nativity story are YOU telling Jane?  We had a good laugh.

We watched the movie, "Klaus."  It was so late once the girls went to bed!  I think it must have been 9:30 or 10pm!  But just as I was putting Jane down she said, "Mom!  We need to put cookies and milk out for Santa!"  We sure do.  I think this is my favourite picture of all of Christmas.  That adorable face.  Hand on cheek?  It's too much.

Christmas morning!  As per usual, the kids opened stockings first, then we had our Christmas cereal.  Then presents!

I got spoiled.  Joe is so clever and creative.  He wrapped up a clue in different gifts and I had to solve it.  Eight years ago, we moved to Ontario and had to leave my baby grande piano in Edmonton.  When we moved back we were never in a living situation or a large enough house to get my piano back to me.  There were many times when Joe almost convinced me to sell it and buy something close to us with the money we made from it, but it was my childhood piano and there was so much sentiment to it.  When Joe asked me what I wanted for Christmas I said, "I want my piano."  But I knew deep down that was a huge ask and it likely wasn't going to happen.  But.  He made it happen.  I bawled on the spot.

And this gem is what I got for Joe.  He also bawled on the spot.  Haha!  JK.  I suck.  Not kidding.  As soon as I opened my gift I was like, "forget it!  Don't bother!  Let me try again!"  Haha!  We have been playing a lot of "Drawful" as a family and this is one of the many hilarious pictures that Jane drew so I thought it would be funny to put on a blanket for Joe.  I mean, Joe can get himself whatever he wants whenever, so I thought it would be cute to get him something he could laugh at.  Well.  He did laugh.  I totally lost the gift giving game.

One of my favourite parts about Christmas is watching the kids be kids and just PLAY together.

At the top of Zoe's list was a wine goblet.  She got two very fancy Christmas goblets and they were her favourite things!  Do not ask me why.  I guess they just make her feel fancy.  She used them every day all Christmas season.  And well, we are into February and she is still using them.  I'm shocked they've lasted this far.

More winter fun.  Thank you snow plows!  They created the BEST sledding hill right in front of our house and it stayed like this for a number of weeks.  We weren't complaining!

Our attempted quinsy.  We spent about four separate days on this but I did something to my back and then Joe was back at work and well?  It's got a partial hole for an entrance and that's about as far as we got.  It was fun to work on though, even if it didn't get finished!

This was our New Years Eve!  We ate some more, stayed up late and finished this puzzle.

I'm sure I missed a bunch of stuff, but I think this covered quite a lot of it.  We usually visit Joe's family for the holidays and have lots of different parties to attend but this year that was all shut down.  It was weird to not be as busy with Christmas concerts (church, choir and school).  It was weird not singing at any particular function.  It was weird not attending any Favourite Things parties or Church gatherings or work parties.  No external family.  Nothing.  But it was also kind of nice to slow down and it forced us to get creative.  We wrote and recorded a Christmas song called, "Covid's Gettin' Coal" and filmed a music video for it.  It was so fun to put it together and be a family together.  We shared it with our external family and friends to show that we still planned to party hard Burnham-style no matter what restrictions were thrown our way, and I think we did.  We also had a zoom Christmas piano recital where we zoomed in with my parents and my sisters, Jenny and Sarah and each performed the Christmas songs we had been working on.  We also zoomed with my family and each shared a funny video we put together (ours was our music video) or a song, poem, etc.  Doug did a video of a cooking show with his kids and I laughed my face off.  Sarah did a video where she pretended to play a song on piano, but really it was Taylor!  Haha!  Spencer and his family sang 12 days of Christmas Canadian style.  It was good times.  Though we were restricted in what we could do, I think our creativity brought our family closer together.  Definitely a memorable Christmas.