"boxing day", new year's eve, and epiphany

The day after Christmas, we cleaned up a bit and the kids sorted out their piles of toys to pose for their traditional Christmas toy picture.

We normally also celebrate Boxing Day by having my whole family over for our big holiday meal, but we postponed it this year since my sister was coming in the next day.  Sadly, she had to cancel those plans, but the dinner was already planned so we kept it that way.  This gave us time to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens with Uncle Danny instead.  The kids also got to open presents from him since he had gotten in late on Christmas night.  And who doesn't love Uncle Danny and more presents?

Gus might have thought this day was better than Christmas...

On the 27th, we celebrated "Boxing Day."  We feasted and the kids broke poppers...

Then we tried out some sparklers outside.

Sometimes these pictures turn out a little bit haunting...

Nora was so thrilled to have a big girl like Lucia around to play with her and especially to be an Elsa to her Anna...

She also like all the candy around the house, but having Nano and Nana come visit was probably a close second to the candy.

There was lots of candy...

Uncle Danny helped the kids make a gingerbread house...

In his usual fashion, Baabee helped add Reindeer poop...

On New Year's Eve the Kerstings came over along with some other old GP friends of Zach's.  We did a 10:00 midnight with confetti poppers and noise makers.

Then we took the kids outside to send off a floating lantern...

Then some more sparklers because we still had so many left over...

Then we watched the floating lanterns in Tangled...

Then we let the kids demolish to gingerbread house...

We played games...

And then somehow it became real midnight before we got any kids into bed.  Whoops.  This is a nice picture of Zach and I probably right before everyone decided to meltdown into a pile of tears.

 We kept our decorations and dead tree up until the Epiphany.  We usually have one last night of reading Christmas books by our fireplace, but this year we added an Epiphany tradition of chalking our door as and saying a blessing.  I hope to keep doing it.  It was a nice way to bring closure to the season.  I never really want it to end, but it nice to get back to a calmer life... because that always happens, right?