Christmas Eve is my favorite day of the year

  Now that I'm a grown up, Christmas Eve is my favorite day.  When I was a child, it was Christmas day of course but now that I'm the mom, it's more fun for me to spend the day before prepping my boys for the 'big day', talking about Santa...watching every single Christmas episode of every one of our favorite shows...watching the classic Christmas movies like Rudolph and Christmas Story, and National Lampoons Christmas Vacation ;)  We've added Elf to the list in recent years.

I spend almost all day in the kitchen baking cookies for Santa.  My boys seem to think that he needs a variety to choose from, so I end up baking chocolate chip, peanut butter, butter balls, and oatmeal raisin.  This year I changed it up a bit with the French Butter cookies from Annie's Eats (which were a huge hit!) and I scaled the rest back and just made chocolate chip.  Meanwhile, I added peppermint bark, candied pecans, and sugar-free apple butter for my FIL.  He has to watch his blood sugar, so I always try to make something special just for him.  Oh!, and I almost forgot about the vanilla sugar and the hot chocolate mix. 

For dinner I make spaghetti and meat balls.  It's fast and easy, and nearly impossible to screw up (which is important because I'm usually running on fumes by Christmas Eve).  

After dinner, I love to pull up the NORAD Santa tracker for the boys, and let them watch his progress as he makes his way to New England.  Then, after the boys are finally in bed I hurry to wrap the things that I never got around to wrapping before.  I stuff stockings, and watch movies on t.v.  This year, I think I'm watching the latest Resident Evil movie.  Maybe that'll be my newest tradition... horror movies on Christmas Eve.

This year, I let Alex help me a little bit.  He got to count out 30 mint candies (he got to 29 before he ran into trouble), unwrap them and put them in a bag, and break them into pieces with a rolling pin.  I took a hammer to them after he was done ;)  The boys have been on quality control all afternoon, tasting everything I've made along the way.  It's been really difficult to get some nutritious food into their bodies, what with all the cheese-it chex mix, and peppermint candies, and white chocolate, and peppermint bark, and chocolate chip cookies.  I still have some banana bread and pumpkin bread to make, but I seem to have run out of butter, lol.  No worries though...I'm sending Aaron out for more butter...and also spaghetti...cause I may have forgotten to get some for tonight's dinner.

After Santa's cookies are out, the boys are in bed, and gifts are wrapped, Aaron and I usually exchange gifts.  He's not a morning person and I don't like to wait till the afternoon to get my presents, or for him to open is.  So we get to exchange our gifts quietly, just the two of us and no boys being loud or making a mess of things.  It's a good system...it works.

Merry Christmas!