Grandma Taylor's Christmas Party

My mom loves Christmas. When we were kids, despite the fact that there wasn't much money left over after feeding and clothing ten mouths, my mom always seemed to have enough money to make Christmas special for us. Although we didn't get as many presents as some of my friends did, we were grateful for the presents that we did get. Once we got older, Christmas wasn't as fun and now that my mom has twelve grandkids to spoil, her love of Christmas is back!

She had a Christmas Party on December 23rd. We all brought hors devours, she had the kids decorate her tree downstairs, she pulled out the jingle bells for the kids to carol with and the puppets for the kids to perform the traditional "Night Before Christmas" show. Despite the fact that my mom made the mistake of telling Allie that she was "in charge" of decorating the downstairs tree, to which Allie appointed herself the "boss" over my two "not so willing to be bossed around" eight-year-old nieces, the kids actually managed the decorating without any broken ornaments and very few tears shed. Even Katya joined in the fun, after some minor grumbling from being pulled away from the computer.

The kids loved shaking the jingle bells while singing and my mom taught them a couple of songs that she used to sing when she was a little girl.
The kids were very entertaining with their rendition of the Night Before Christmas (somehow the Nephi puppet kept popping up during the story - imagine that!). The tears shed by my nephew, Ethan, in response to Santa's sack of toys being taken away from him, only added to the hilarity of the show!
My mom is an awesome gift giver. In fact, according to Alex, my mom has surpassed his giving skills and is now awarded the Best Gift Giver prize. I, on the other hand, rank towards the bottom of his list of gift givers. I will admit that in the past I have given him gifts that were not very creative or expensive or spectacular (when we were dating, I once gave him a basketball for his birthday and a cordless phone for Christmas, to which he has never let me forget how much he didn't like these presents). However, I have to say that Alex is not top on my list of gift receivers. He takes back almost everything I get for him, making the act not very fun to begin with.

My mom knitted all the granddaughters "scrump" dolls and all the grandsons "sackboy" dolls. Alex started her on this project. For those of you that may not know who these characters are: Scrump is the doll from Lilo and Stitch - the doll that Lilo makes to play with the other girls because she couldn't afford a real doll - and Sackboy is a video game character. Alex read about a knitting pattern for the Sackboy doll in one of this gaming magazines and was thereafter on a quest to track down the knitting magazine that held the pattern (how funny is that! Can you imagine Alex in Barnes and Nobles asking them if they had the most recent "Knitting" magazine?) so that my mom could make this doll for Tony. Once the pattern was secured, he noticed that the size of it was also very similar to Allie's Scrump doll. We had bought Allie a Scrump doll right before the movie came out (seven years ago?) and Allie has carried that doll around everywhere, including Disneyland, left it at many different stores (good thing we put our name and number on the tag), used it as a sweat rag and that poor doll looks like it is about one hundred years old. The problem is, Scrump dolls are very hard to come by. On eBay, you could buy a replacement doll for about $100! So, Alex also requested that my mom make Allie a new Scrump doll. Good thing my mom likes Alex so much :)
Allie and Katya loved the dolls and the party was a screaming success - literally! By the end of the night, twelve kids together, mixed with them all being tired, made for a whole lot of screaming going on!