Seaborn Family: Our Christmas Celebrations.

As with all families, we choose to celebrate Christmas multiple times so that we can maximize on family time and eating time.

Now that we have our own family, we celebrate with the boys Christmas morning before church by opening our stockings.

After church, we have brunch and then gather around the tree and start opening presents.

But before the boys can open presents, they must pose for the obligatory photos with the grandparents.

After our family celebrated (with grandparents), we then have a relaxing afternoon so that we can prepare for the first of the Christmas dinners. This year, we continued the tradition of heading to the Seaborns at the Sycamore House to enjoy the annual Seaborn feast. The feast starts out with appetizers and the obligatory whiskey sour.

And no Seaborn family dinner is complete with not 1 but 2 plum puddings. This is a photo of the 2nd plum pudding. Needless to say after this fabulous feast prepared by Geofford's Aunt Carol, we were not hungry for a few days.

Unfortunately for our waistlines, we hosted some of my high school friends at our annual post-Christmas potluck at our new house. As usual, there was a lot of wonderful food prepared. After the dinner, we had a Chinese gift exchange (I think that I prefer the terms Gift Grab or Yankee Swap, but that's just me). You can see in the foreground some of the gifts from the gift exchange (Keating actually stole the gift that he brought, I think that we may have to change the rules for next year).

We had one more big dinner party, with the Chinese Church friends, but Geofford wasn't able to make it so I didn't get to take any photos, but it was a fabulous dinner with a lot of wonderful food at the Chan's new house just next to the canal.

Our last big Christmas celebration was with the Kwoks. Historically we have spent some Christmases apart (as our in-laws don't live in town) and well we see each other quite frequently, so we decided to celebrate a couple weeks after Christmas Day to be able to spread out our holidays and to take advantage of Boxing Day sales :D, but really is was so that we can celebrate Christmas together without having to rush around to do so. This was the first year that the celebration was not celebrated in Manotick (this was also only the 3rd year that we celebrated late). As you can see below, the boys are thrilled to have to dress up for a second family Christmas celebration.

We started off the festivities in Russell where we had brunch. We also tried to take pictures of the family, but decided that the kids really are the most interesting ones to photograph. As it was almost nap time, it was difficult to get a serious picture of all of them, but it was very easy to get a picture of them making funny faces.

After the kids naps (I don't think that any of the adults were able to adults napped, and I know for certain that Jaclyn gave up her nap to make Connor's Toy Story 3 cake), we returned to my parents' house for another fabulous Christmas dinner (although I still have yet to roast a chicken properly - I can do turkey, but not chicken...go figure), we were able to enjoy Connor's Toy Story 3 cake, which was the culmination of months of hard work on his part. We promised him that he could get a Toy Story 3 (emphasis on the 3 because that is what all of the commercials are for right now, and he is 3) cake when he no longer needed diapers. Unfortunately (but fortunately), this coincided with Christmas (so it was a wonderful Christmas present for Geofford and I) so we decided to delay giving him the cake so that we could have a proper celebration for this momentous occasion. Congratulations to my little man for achieving this important milestone!