Christmas and New Year's Eve 2009

I finally got some pictures ready to show! First, the look of Christmas:

Magstadt is pretty covered in snow! I took the first photo from the street level, but that's what we see from our living room/kitchen windows. Since we are still getting settled in the new place I didn't feel like getting a big tree. So we decorated a little potted pine and put it on top of the desk. I really like how it looks! I used real cranberries for the garland and a bunch of cinnamon ornaments from Mary. And there's all the presents under the desk.
We had a candlelight service at our church on Christmas Eve. Then our friends Steffen and Ariane, and Amber came over for dinner. They brought Ethan a Carrera race track. That's the three boys putting it together. I don't know why Ethan is slapping his head, but that photo cracks me up!!!! Ariane is a professional harpist. This is the smallest of her collection of harps. She played and we all sang some Christmas songs.

I don't have many pictures from Christmas Day. I spent the whole time running around the kids sorting the garbage for recycling and writing down what gift came from who. Thank you to everyone who sent gifts! Everything from everyone is really cool!
New Year's Eve was spent with the youth group. There was about 30 of us at midnight. Some of the kids left after the fireworks but I think 15 of them stayed all night. I stayed awake all night running the DVD player and doing digital scrapbooking. A surprising amount of kids stayed up all night. Including ETHAN!!! Can you figure out why? We had champagne (alcohol free) with the kids in paper cups. Haha! That was my fault. But it was kind of funny! Then Rob set of fireworks in the church parking lot. There were some really cool ones but I didn't get many good photos. The new camera is AWESOME but I should have read how to get good shots BEFORE the event. I didn't think to put it on manual focus until it was all over. Oh well! The memories are good!

Happy New Year everyone!