Christmas Eve-2009

Zach and I celebrate Christmas Eve with the Haleys (my side). We join my sister and brother, grandma Lolly, and parents. Our dinner is pizza. Each one of us "puts in our order" and we make the pizzas to our liking. My family has some other fun traditions that I want to share with you.

To start the month long festivities off, Thanksgiving weekend we hang our Christmas stockings. Each stocking is unique to that person so it's neat to see all the different personalities hanging there. There is a purpose for these stockings to be hung on Thanksgiving weekend: we place money in them!

(Dad's, Mom's, Kim's, Zach's, Jessie's, Alex's)

Instead of buying presents for each member of our family, we put money in the stocking. At the end of the weekend we get to take our money out of our stockings and then we get to shop for our own presents.

Here is some history behind this tradition of 7 years:

1) My Grandma was tired of trying to find presents for us, only to have us return them.

2) Grandma and my parents didn't want to just give us money or gift cards only to never see what we purchased with the $.
3) We wanted to make our tradition creative, fun, and competitive.

So here are the steps the Haley's Christmas:
1) Take $ out of stocking.

2) Buy your own presents (you can choose to spend your $ on a bunch of little gifts or a few big ones or somewhere in between).

3) Wrap presents creatively (you will be judged on this later).

4) Set up presents Christmas Eve for competition #1.

5) Open presents one at a time so that everyone can see what you bought.

6) Laugh at the unexpected presents that you "gave" to others.

7) Vote for the winner of the best of the 4 categories.

Here is my parents' living room. If you look closely you can see some of the wrapping themes for this year. My dad did a cougar theme (surprise surprise) and my mom did a reindeer theme. She had a balloon reindeer pulling a sleigh with all her presents driven by a reindeer. It was a lot of work and was really cool, and she did knock me off the podium this year. I was reining champ for best wrapped for two years running! I think she just got sympathy votes personally :)

Here are our wrapped gifts for this year. Mine was more about the construction than the theme. I think only my engineer dad appreciated it. I used a pole and mounted all my presents so that they could manuever around the pole. Each present had a hole in it placed in different spots. Zach's theme was about us moving. He used leftover moving paper to wrap his gifts.

(construction process)

(final product)

(Zach did have me write the "location" for each package.

That was the only help I gave. Grandma's poinsettia theme is to the right)

We have several competitions throughout the night. Here are the 4 categories:

#1 Best Wrapped Gift

#2 Best Bought Gift

#3 Least Likely Gift

#4 Best Deal

Winning any one of these categories puts you into the "Haley Hall of Fame" and gets you a movie gift certificate.

Below are the winners of 2009-

Alex (Best Deal & Least Likely), Dad (Best Gift), Mom (Best Wrapped)

What I love is that we get exactly what we would like/need for Christmas and we get to see what we "bought" each other. It's so much fun to see what my grandma wanted or what my dad needed. Side notes: This year my bro Alex wrote himself notes on his packages that kept us laughing everytime he opened a gift. And Jess has used the same wrapping paper 3 years in a row. Stupid costco paper! Hopefully next year she'll step up her game so that she's at least in the running.

Zach decided that his old stocking wasn't good enough. This new stocking will hold a lot more money... he thinks :)

This tradition works out great for us. I like that instead of the normal hustle and bustle around Christmas of scrambling to buy presents for my family and spending money just to spend money, we get to slow down a little because some of the pressure is off. Despite all the goofiness and competition of our night, we still honor what this day is truly about- the birth of our Savior.