The Westergard Family: Christmas 2009

Christmas is such a busy time of year for our family. This year I was in charge of our ward Christmas party. It was stressful because I can never do anything the simple way. I always have to go above and beyond. However, my wonderful mom helped me make a nice roast beef dinner for everyone. Once that was done we had a couple birthday parties for our nieces Londyn and Ellie, and probably about four family Christmas parties. Mark and I had our sixth wedding anniversary on the 13^th. Then there was Christmas and Carter’s birthday party. All I can say is between all that and shopping I’m pooped and ready for the holidays to be over. That might make me sound like a Grinch but this was a tough year anyways.

It is my families first Christmas without Dad and it’s rough. Dad was a big part of my Christmas memories and it really hurt not to have him here. On Christmas he would make such a big deal about all the neat gifts and he always had a story to go with each one of them like, “this is the best camera out there,” or “we had to go to five different stores to find that.” He would smell the new books because he loved that for some reason and was so animated with each gift he received, even if he didn’t really want it. It was definitely hard on Mom and Sharlee because they lived with him. So this year Mark, the boys, and I spent the night at Mom’s on Christmas Eve and opened presents at her house in the morning.

On Christmas Eve we had a nice dinner with the Westergard’s. Grandma made sugar cookies with the kids and we watched the nativity story. We then went to Mom’s house and opened our Christmas pajamas. Luckily we had presents wrapped so we could go to bed. My mom has shutters in her house that block out the light completely so we slept in until 9:00am. We opened gifts and then went back over to the Westergard’s for breakfast. Susan made a really nice breakfast and then we opened presents with them. We then went home got dressed and headed back to mom’s for Christmas dinner/lunch with the rest of my siblings. We opened gifts with my family and then visited my grandma Slater. Normally we would then go home and have everyone come to our house for Carter’s birthday but I just couldn’t do it this year,it was too much. We had Carter’s birthday the next day.

It was a busy but nice Christmas. The boys got a lot of new toys and Carter was a lot more fun this year because he knew what was going on. I got clothes, books, and jewelry. Mark got an I-touch and we all had a good time.