The Christmas Story

I haven't mentioned what we did for the holidays yet.  I suppose we were so busy going from one party to the next that chronicling it just sort of fell to the wayside.

Since we came back to Utah we decided to split Christmas and Thanksgiving each year between our families.  Last year we spent Turkey day in Idaho and Christmas in Vernal.  This year just the opposite.  The one constant we have had is taking the kids Trick or Treating with their cousins Ava and Stella.  It has been very fun because all of these kids are the perfect age to really get a kick out of shamelessly begging complete strangers for candy in the middle of the night.  This year was awesome.  They all came to our new neighborhood.  We ate pizza afterward and just had a sporting time.

Thanksgiving in the Rasmussen family is an event.  We went up to Flaming Gorge to Aunt Betty's cabin where 2 short of 800 people showed up or so it seemed.  I guess I've been out of the family party circuit for a while because there were so many new appendages that I just didn't even recognize.  At times I felt as out of place as Michelle did when she first met the Rasmussen's.  It's gotten to be a huge party and I loved every second of it.  Especially when Casi pulled out the Dilly beans.  We took the kids out back with Aunt LaJean and played football on the basketball court.  There are few things as satisfying as talking trash about the U of U tewts to Jackson and Carson Rasmussen.  If their cousin wasn't already named "Fireball" I would have called them that myself.  Good kids.

I am pretty sure that we had a party, a get together, an office function, an engagement, an awards ceremony, a mid-week nativity every stinking day of the week for 9 weeks straight.  This was even more than usual this time of year.  Kellie went to my 514th party at Squatters.

Christmas in Idaho was four weekends jammed into 7 weeks.  We were there for 10 days just on a long leave cycle but then the next weekend we had to go back to welcome home Brady and then shortly thereafter we went back again to hear his homecoming talk.  It's good to see the kid back.   He is doing very well and will be even better when he gets his sea-legs under him.  Coming home from a mission is hard; especially if you did it right.

We celebrated Christmas in Island Park at Gene and Connie's cabin.  We stayed in the extra rooms downstairs and then Gene rented the cabin across the street for the Bagley's.  It took until about 2 in the afternoon to open all the presents.  They all came over to open our presents first because we were pretty sure our boys might spontaneously explode if they weren't allowed to find out everything Santa had brought them at the butt crack of dawn.  (some how some where they know I said 'butt' and they are giggling uncontrollably and repeating it even more uncontrollably).  Then we trekked across the street in out PJs to open the Bagley's Christmas presents.

We rode snow machines, pulled kids on sleds behind the machines, snow shoe'd in the meadow, tunneled in the drifts, put together puzzles, played Halo, taught Logan to spin donuts in the church parking lot, skied at Grande Targhee, ate a lot of food and hung out with Brigham and Mackay's lady suiters - the Sommer girls.

Matt and Meisha even came down and spent a night at our place here in S. Ogden while skiing the Greatest Snow on Earth.  We had a very good and eventful couple of months.  I'm sure this wasn't as interesting to read as other posts but this is important for us to chronicle because someday Michelle will come up with some crazy concocted story about how we met for the first time after a church meeting when actually it was after as dance while we were cleaning up the gym.  And I need to be the one who wrote the official history.  Or at least know how to edit it when necessary.

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As a special note today -- I went skiing at Snow Basin with the Grandma Susie and the boys.  Grandma entertained one boy on the lodge patio while I took the other up and down the bunny hill a thousand times and then we switched.  This was only Brigham's 4th time and he went off a real nice little jump.  Dude caught about a foot and half of air for the first time ever!  To quote the little kid on the tricycle from The Incredibles, "THAT WAS AWESOME!".