A VERY Merry Christmas Eve (Part two)

WARNING: Lots of photos 🙂

Christmas for the Dedeker clan arrives on December 24^th, a WHOLE day before I was ever allowed to open gifts, this is a pretty great new tradition in my mind.  Once we started dating we always celebrated Christmas Eve with Justin’s family and Christmas day with mine. This year was no exception!  We all got up early-ish on Saturday and visited before getting ready for church.  Justin’s family is Adventist, which means I always feel like I get a bonus weekend day when we are visiting, since I associate Church with Sunday… tangent…After church we all piled in our many vehicles and headed over to the good ole’ Macaroni Grill for lunch.  Apparently, we are now old, so we were stuck 🙂 sitting with the adults for this meal! No more kids table for us! We secretly high-fived.  Because at the adult’s table, you get to discuss dreams about being nude and monkey poop coffee! Really?! That is not normal… well that is what we discussed!! Apparently all the Dedekers have a similar dream about being in a public situation partially or in some cases, nude. The most common was topless & in underwear! This cracks me up, the outlaws (aka, spouses) found constant amusement in their dreams and deciphering what they could mean.  Then my MIL dropped a bomb excuse the future pun  of a story involving her enjoyment of monkey or lizard (not sure it makes a difference) poop coffee. I guess it is a really expensive type of coffee bean that is processed after an animal digests it and then you know… poops it out?!!? GROSS!!!! She was busy defending it and I could not hardly breathe I was laugh/gagging so hard just thinking about that.  Nope. Sorry, that is one fancy pants trend I am not going to try!About three and a half hours later, busy? No, just slow… we left for home to hang out and nap before heading back over to Dean & Evie’s house for Christmas Eve dinner & gifts!!

Dinner was delish as always, we had pulled pork sandwiches, tortellini soup and tons of appetizers & Conner’s fabulous apple pies! YUMMY!!! When we were all in a food coma, we decided to get to work on the mass amounts of presents. Did y’all see that tree?! 17 people from extremely generous families comes out to be a LOT of presents!!!A few funny moments from the night:

Jason received a waffle maker and exclaimed, “blessings to you! I LOVE waffles” HAHA!! He was so genuinely excited to get a waffle maker! LOVED it!Then the Tennessee Dedekers, have an alpaca farm located just a few miles down the road, so alpacas were the theme! We had alpaca head bands, socks, scarves, etc… the funniest part was that Jenna told us they came from the alpaca babies!  This created the sarcastic ones from the group to remark on how there used to be an alpaca farm near them… now we are wearing it!  Side note: my alpaca head band rocks, so crazy warm and soft!

Again with the Tennessee Dedekers, they also gave Conner a pair of pants that are made out of water hoses or firemen’s hoses?! Not really sure, but they are like super thick carharts, pretty nifty pants.  Well, Derek (Conner’s older brother) was just about in a fit wanting these pants, so to say he was excited when he opened up his very own pair would be an understatement!!! It was hilarious!!!

They also gave all the Coffman boys naked man underwear in a can! HAHA! Apparently according to the Mr. they are awesome.

We made the all knowing mistake of giving the MN boys duck & goose calls. . . it was never quiet again!

I have two favorite gifts, one that was received really nicely and the other that was so cute!!  Justin’s family all has North Face coats, me included and we all wear them pretty much all the time. Well, this year for Papa’s birthday he received a North Face coat too. . .  Now, according to Grandma she was the only one in the FAMILY who didn’t have a North Face and she wanted one!!! This is really cute on so many levels, mainly because she is very soft spoken and doesn’t really ask anyone for anything, and I think everyone in the family knew what she was getting because I even heard about her wanting one at least three times 🙂  Go Grandma, get that gift!!!

The second gift that turned out to be an unexpected super emotional gift was a spotting scope (I know, this is not exactly what it is boys…) but a really high tech scope for Ryan.  Ryan is a Marine Sniper who is getting ready to head over to Afghanistan for his last tour here in March.  This past Thanksgiving we learned of a scope that basically allows him to see his target  from 1600 meters. It also tells him, wind, temperature, levels, etc… it is pretty neat.  Anyways, it was a big ticket item that the majority of the family, us included had our hand in on in order to get him this for his job.  In our minds, any small thing we can do to help our military, especially Ryan we will do.  So gift given… he knew he was getting it and in turn he gave the most sincere, appreciative thank you to the family I have ever heard.

They are his words, so I won’t go into detail, I will just leave it at there wasn’t many dry eyes around that tree when he was done.  I also hope he is reading …. And knows that all of us would do anything for him and will be supporting him from a far while he is away!!!

This cracks me up, tough marine still gets tackled by his big brother!

Moving on from that gift. . . I was sufficiently fueled up with Starbuck’s gift cards (apparently, my addiction is not so secret!) and many other great gifts.  Justin’s aunt even quilted a t-shirt quilt for his grandfather with shirts from all the kids! It turned out so great!!!!

About three hours of highly organized gift opening later… it was time to head home and get our Christmas PJ’s on and into bed!!!

I am grateful for my new camera so that I was able to capture all the great moments throughout this past week!!