Bryant Family Christmas

This past weekend was exciting for many reasons, but 1st on the list is cause my mom's whole family came to town to celebrate CHRISTMAS! Yes we realize it's a bit early but our family is that cool that we don't need a calendar to tell us when christmas is! So for that reason and cause we have a lot about to happen in the life of this family...some births, marriages, medical procedures, birthdays, vacations, and so on. We celebrated together this past weekend! And oh what fun it was! Whenever you get this many people together, especially this many people who love to take pictures you wind up with soooo many pictures and instead of bombarding my blog with a million pictures that may only be interesting to me, I have made a couple of collages to sum up the festivities!

This collage is the amazing meal we all had together, coupled with a few afternoon naps, some playing, etc. After which the joy of the gift exchange got under way. In our family we buy presents for the children but the adults play a gift exchange game. Like dirty santa. It's always H-I-L-A-R-I-O-U-S!!!! No matter how great YOU think your gift may be, it always ends up going to the wrong person who could not possibly enjoy your gift. For example last year ben brought home a glass tree figurine. It's pretty and I like it but it's just really funny when the men get those kinds of things. Again this year tom and jarod ended up leaving with matching christmas serving dishes. Cracks me up to think about. My aunt deb bought an amazing selection of keurig coffees. Not knowing that you have to have THAT particular very expensive coffee maker in order to enjoy that nice assortment of coffees. Again hilarious!!!

So here's the collage summing up the gift giving extravaganza. Aiden got a dump truck from papaw and mimi that he has not let go of since and a racecar that he is also very fond of. My aunt made him an adorable hat with his name on it and a matching scarf that he WILL love, even if he doesn't know it yet. I had to model the hat for the picture :) So aiden left very pleased with his christmas gifts and ben and I came out of the gift exchange with an awesome UT bird house and a gift card. Not too shabby if I do say so myself! But what you leave with really isn't the point...being together and laughing so hard and loving on your family is really what made this day incredible! And I for one am so glad we got to celebrate early cause my christmas cheer is just in full swing right now. I have ditched many of my obligations so far this week in favor of doing christmasy stuff with aiden. Enjoying the season and enjoying my family. LOVE LOVE LOVE :)

And just cause this sums up the joy of christmas to a 2 year old, this is how we found him the morning after...sleeping with his head on his garbage truck. I love it!!! I'm loving seeing christmas through his eyes, how excited he gets over everything, how grateful he is for his toys, it's magical!