Christmas comes but once a year... fortunately.
This year has had a wonderful Christmas season. It started to get cold, but then warmed up some for Christmas week. Based on an inspiring post on the joys of Christmas, we decided to give a little of our own.

Some good friends decided to give us a tent and tunnel. It connected to a firetruck that we had and took up most of the living room. This gift showed up on the day before Christmas Eve. So, Christmas started a little early. But the boys loved it. Can you tell?

When we were trying to think of ways to make this a nice Christmas and thought that we might need to start a new tradition. After all, traditions have to start sometime. We had been offered a piñata earlier for a birthday, but declined it. Then we got to thinking about how nice it was outside and decided to make one for Christmas Eve day since hitting piñatas probably don't totally fall under the definition of keeping the Sabbath Day holy. We decided to do a simple balloon as the form. As we were looking at it at first, we noticed that we might be able to make it look like Santa's head. The form was just about right. We could have even made the point look like a red Santa hat. But then we thought that maybe it would be better not to have the kids swinging a bat at someone's head. After all, to alter a quote from a famous movie, from Principal Svadean: "Look, Pedro, I don't know how they do things down in Juarez, but here in [Florida] we have a little something called pride. Understand? Smashing in the face of a pinata that resembles [Santa Claus] is a disgrace to you, me, and the entire [Sunshine] State." So, we decided gingerbread man wrapping paper would be just fine. After all, "Run, Run, Run as fast as you can, you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man" seems easily changed to "Swing, Swing, Swing as much as you can, you can't hit me, I'm the gingerbread [piñata]."

Yes, the piñata is cantilevered and held up with a c-clamp instead of a pulley. Thing 4 was able to take a swing at it with a little help. Then we went from youngest to oldest. Thing 3 went next. They each had 3 hits at the piñata.

We even got some great action shots.

And some action misses. The bat was really soft at the end since we had removed most of the core.

They each hit the piñata 3 times before passing on the bat.

We didn't blindfold them though. We probably should have, but they will be able to remember what it was they were doing now. At what age do you blindfold a little kid to have them swing at a piñata?

By this point, the piñata was kind of deformed. It only had 2 layers of newspaper on it. There wasn't too much to hit through.

Then the neighbor girl actually hit it to the ground with a tomahawk chop that ripped out the top.

We finished the deed by throwing it down at the ground from up on the steps until it ruptured like an appendix. Then kids and adults rushed in and grabbed up the candy and toys. Joyous sugar rushes were had by all. (And to answer the question, yes there are pea pods growing on the pea plant growing up the stairs, and they taste great.)

Living in a one story apartment does have its problems when Christmas morning comes. Growing up in a 100+ year old house, you could hardly get near the stairway without having enough squeaking, not to mention the chair that was set at the top of the stairway. Fortunately, we have a hallway in our apartment. Unfortunately, our boys have no problem moving chairs or even a baby gate out of the way. Our solution, double high baby gates. It worked. Even the little boy who got stuck trying to shimmy feet first under the gate up to his shoulders only to realize his head wouldn't fit and have to be pulled back out the way he came by his brother. (We had the camera on the wrong side of the gate to get a picture of this.)

Now, I am not going to say which boy in red pajamas tried to sneak out to the living room, but it could have been any one of these 4 anxious to get out to see their gifts.

Here they are eye-ing their gifts from Santa for the first time. Really, they seemed to be eye-ing each other's gifts, but they were excited to find out which was theirs.

Now, the next 5 hours involved breakfast, eating candy, getting dressed for church, eating candy, a wonderful sacrament meeting, eating candy, gift opening, a nap, and more gift opening. When all was said and done, the boys got their biggest Christmas gift of all. It was not the biggest because of size. It was probably the most expensive, though the money was spent about 2 decades ago. They got the remainder of my legos. It was not a small collection, though modest by some standards. It was full of the best legos I set aside last year when we gave them some of the collection. Regardless where they came from, they all loved them.

When I say all, I mean all.

Merry Christmas!