The Christams Holiday in a Nutshell

We had a fun-filled two weeks of Christmas this year. It began December 18th, as soon as the boys were off the bus we were in the van headed to St. Louis for Christmas with Mike's Dad and Carol. It was a nice visit and there was enough snow falling to make it very festive but not dangerous for driving.

I took most of the of the time off the week before Christmas and then the whole week after. To start off the fun I took the boys to a Purdue basketball game with my friend Carrie and 3 of her 4 boys. They won and it was fun.

Adam made this awesome sign!

The annual Bratt boys cookie bake was on the 23rd. We baked all day long and made a lot of yummy cookies and candies for the neighbors. I was adventurous this year and made candy cane coffee cakes for the first time. They turned out good. I might have to try it again next year.

Christmas Eve we traveled to Brazil to spend the day with my family. There was plenty of good food and fun. The coolest gift was a marshmallow gun. I am sure Grandma will be finding little marshmallows for a long time. We have band the gun from the house; little marshmallows would not be good for Andrew. It will be an outside toy.

Matthew loved his new boots for the creek.

Matthew and Adam were up at 4:45 a.m. Christmas morning excited to open presents. We managed to get them to wait until 6 to open presents. It is customary for Santa to bring underwear. This year he brought boxers (at the request of Matthew who said it isn't cool to be wearing tighty-whities anymore) and they were very excited. Matthew put his on right away.

Christmas day we drove to Lansing, IL to have Christmas dinner with Mike's mom and her family. It was a smaller group this year but very enjoyable. The boys received way to many gifts but they loved them all.

We decided to stick around for a few days after Christmas. On Saturday we traveled downtown to have lunch at Italian Village which was tradition for Mike when he was young. This is the third year we have done this and I hope to continue the tradition. We also looked at the Marshall Fields windows. The theme this year was the journey of a letter to Santa from the child all the way to Santa. It was really cute. We can't go downtown anymore without the boys wanting to go to the Lego store so we hopped on the train to go to the store and then spent the rest of the afternoon walking along Michigan Avenue. It snowed the entire day and it was really beautiful. Chicago ended up with 8 inches of snow by the end of the day.