Merry Christmas!!

So....I'm a few days late. For the record, it's still Christmas at our house. We keep the tree lit and the lights outside sparkle until the feast of the Epiphany, good Catholic girl that I am. ;) We had a wonderful holiday. The family converged at our house on Christmas Eve for a delicious dinner prepared by all the mamas: I made the ham, my mom made our traditional "rellenong manok" (stuffed chicken), and Rob's mom brought a flank steak. Hello, carnivores! I also made caldo verde, braised red cabbage, candied yams, and leche flan to round out the meal. As usual, we had waaaay too much and will be eating leftovers all this week.

After dinner, we lounged a bit as we waited for Midnight Mass. My mom, sister, and I prepared the bola bola for the ginataan while my mom chopped the rest of the ingredients. Colin decided to join in and had a little fun creating his "admiral" and "fleet" out of glutinous rice flour:


The admiral (foreground) and his growing fleet. :)

And, of course, we couldn't skip the cookies for Santa. Here he is making the easiest cookies ever (thank you, Costco!):

11pm rolled around before we knew it and we were out the door to snag some seats at church. We were greeted with the heavenly sounds of our church choir which led us in singing Christmas hymns until it was time for mass to start. It was standing room only, as expected; a lovely mass (and Colin even stayed awake!).

It wasn't hard to get him to bed, however. Just the mere mention of Santa not coming until he was sound asleep made our job easy. And the fact that his head hit the pillow at 2am helped a little. While he slept, the adults celebrated with a mini Noche Buena of queso de bola, coffee, the ginataan which was now finished, as well as an assortment of Filipino desserts. It was 4:30 before we all called it a night. Sigh.......just typing that makes me tired (and full!) all over again........

Christmas morning! Yeah, so we all slept in until about 9:30. Well, that's not completely true. *I* got up at 9:30 and my mom was already over the sink washing dishes. :) We couldn't wait for the little guy to get up, but we knew he needed his sleep if we were to survive Christmas day! When he finally did wake up, he was soooooo sleepy still. But he did run (sluggishly) over to the tree to check out his loot. I don't think he was disappointed. :) Among his gifts were a bike, a Star Wars poster, Star Wars watch, Star Wars Episodes I-VI dvds, Star Wars blanket, Sorcerer's Apprentice DVD and DSi game, $MONEY$, a mini microscope so he could "analyze things" [his words :) ], and a bunch of other fun stuff:

HAM!!!

New bike! :)

He figured out pretty quickly the theme of "his" Christmas wrapping paper--Santa, of course! :)

The rest of the day consisted of lots of lounging in PJs, food, food, food, a friendly game of Upwords, way too much chocolate, wine, and just plain family togetherness. :) All in all, a wonderful first Christmas in our new house.