'Twas the night before Christmas...

and all through the house,
not a creature was stirring,
not even a mouse...

The kids are all tucked in, we've gotten the rest of the presents wrapped, and the stockings stuffed. Now, we're just waiting for morning so we can celebrate together. Although, we already celebrated a bit today. We had our traditional cocktail sausages, cheeseball with crackers, vegetable tray (served with a new dip taken from Rachel Ray's 30-Minute Meals), and wassail. We enjoyed all these yummy snacks while watching The Polar Express on DVD. It's the kids' favorite Christmas movie, and I have to admit Karl and I are big fans too. We never have been big on telling the kids about Santa...we have focused on Christmas being the celebration of Jesus' birth...but the movie still makes us choke up in spots. It's a great story, and of course we think Tom Hanks is great in his many roles. :)

We will finish up our reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens tomorrow hopefully...we've gotten a bit behind due to preparations for Christmas. We should have started it a little sooner...the book is quite verbose and has been quite a challenge to read aloud, even for me who LOVES to read!

I made my first made-from-scratch cheesecake today...for tomorrow's dessert. We'll see how it turns out...I also mixed up the stuffing, so all I have to add is the broth and raw eggs before popping it in the oven tomorrow. I still have to prepare our sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes (making these just because I wanted them!), gravy, green bean casserole, salad, and rolls. We have canned cranberry sauce...berries and no berries...so all I have to do for that is open and pour. And the rolls are brown-n-serve, so they'll be easy too. Karl is planning to make french toast for breakfast tomorrow morning, then we'll open gifts with the kids before starting our lunch preparations. Karl is in charge of the turkey, and will be using our rather large fryer ( a great gift from family...thanks so much!) to cook it in. He has some sort of cajun marinade to inject in it...I can't wait to taste it... The only real downside is he has had to shovel off the deck just to be able to get out there to cook! We had so much snow last week, and with the wind whipping it around, it had drifted so much that it was covering some of the glass in our slider. It's not supposed to be too cold tomorrow (high of 32, heehee) so that's a plus. :)

Well, I hope you all have a wonderful day tomorrow. Merry Christmas!