Our Christmas and New Year's Celebrations



After our wonderful week with Grandpa Wolf, it was time to celebrate Christmas!  Our tradition on Christmas Eve is to go to church and then come home and open the presents we received from grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. So that is what we did!  We braved the very icy/snowy roads and attended a candlelight service on post and then came home and opened some gifts.

After all of the excitement of the new toys on Christmas Eve, it was hard to get the kids to go to bed so Santa could come!   They finally did and were very excited when they woke up.  Can you believe it was after 8:00 when they got up to check out the tree?  They are all wearing their brand new pajamas and slippers they got the night before.

After a  lot of playing and putting things together we did some Christmas day sledding with all of our neighbors!  It was a lot of fun!!  Josef stayed home because he was really into playing his new Wii game.

Here is our line heading out to find a hill!



We had gotten a lot of snow the night before so the snow was really deep.

We had a great Christmas!!  

Now on to New Year's.  In Germany the law is that you can only do fireworks on New Year's Eve/Day.  So this year I bought a few sparklers and fountains to light up and my neighbor bought some rockets.   The kids were waiting patiently all day to do the fireworks.  At about 8:00 they were all going our of their minds and couldn't wait any longer so out we went to do some of them a little early.

At about 9:00 we headed back inside until midnight.  Katriana and Josef were determined to stay up until midnight (which they did) but Gretchen just couldn't make it.  She decided to make a little bed for herself on the coffee table.

At midnight the fun begins!!  Happy New Year!!  A lot of Germans were out shooting off fireworks.  We went out and stood in the street and watched them in the sky in all directions.  The air was filled with smoke and snowflakes.





Cheers to 2011!!