After opening presents, we loaded up the van with enough gear, presents and food to furnish a small army. We got to my parents where the tradition begins. Christmas eve consists of our family, my parents, my Grandma, my brothers/sister & brother-in-law/sisters-in-laws, and eight kids from age 8 to 6 months. My mom kicks the whole thing off with an amazing meal - with an occasional odd thing or two. When someone asks what's in it, one of the kids responds (with their best Mom impersonation) "Oh, it's made of everything you love".

Willy Brown is considered family, and with that comes the need to make himself look better than the rest of us, to be the favored son. Will came by for dessert and brought my parents a really nice wine and cheese basket from an upscale store in town. While he was scoring points with the 'rents, my brothers and I were rooting through the basket trying to come up with an estimate of the cost of the thing - which we guess to be around $65 - $75. Brown noser.

My dad went out and picked out a tree on his own this year, and even decorated it himself. He's got this fancy tilting tree-stand that allows you to rotate it any way you can imagine. Somehow, it's still crooked:


After eating a huge meal, we all get dressed for church and take family pictures. From there we head out to my Mom's church, St. Luke in Haslett. For as many years as I can remember, part of my Christmas tradition consists of going to a Lutheran Christmas Eve service, singing Christmas Carols and ending it all with a candle light service. I really enjoy the tradition, the hymns, dressing up and being there with my whole family. My best Christmas memories are of me sitting next to my Uncle Bill (My favorite uncle and Godfather) wearing my brown corduroy suit and clip on tie while singing my loudest, as my Grandma passed out her beech-nut candies (What is a beechnut anyways??). If one of us notices that the other is not singing, someone is kind enough hold out a hymnal in front of the and point to the words for them - a tradition my father started when we were young. During the candle light service at the end, my brothers and I attempt to set each other's programs on fire and blow out each other's candles. My siblings and I always have a good time at church and (most of the time) my mom looks on proudly as she shows off her whole family.

Once we get home we immediately change out of our clothes and break out the appetizers and cocktails. Everyone brings their own drink to pass (except my brother Dan and sister Susan apparently) - this year we had martinis, sangria and Bailey's. From there we exchagne gifts - the aunts and uncles give the kids their gifts and we each exchange gifts with the person who's name we drew. Tough to describe, but imagine 19 people in the same room (the oldest of the kids being 8) all excited about opening gifts, simultaneously. The kids then spend the next few hours playing with their toys. One notable gift that Cathie got everyone was soccer-boppers, the big inflatable punching gloves. Imagine 5 boys running around whaling on each other with these. Exactly Cathie's intent. It's extra fun for Dan and Kris's three boys, and for Dan, who will probably pop them all within a day - on purpose.

For both sets of parents, we made them a DVD of pictures using Ulead's DVD PictureShow software. It lets you take your digital photos (in 2003 I took 5,200) and display them to music, with a cool menu driven system to navigate the photo albums. It creates digital videos with slick transitions, annotations and narrations that allow you to do a lot with them, including having music play while they're being shown. We sat around that evening for about an hour watching the pictures and laughing.

It was a fun evening that I always look forward to. My mom works her tail off for months leading up to Christmas - shopping, cooking, cleaning (although I'm not sure how her house really gets dirty, other than when we visit) to make Christmas a really amazing time.

Take a look at the pictures here.