Christmas at the Kramers

We had a low-key Christmas.  It’s always just a few of us here at Christmas time.  Long ago we declared Thanksgiving as our holiday that we wanted everyone home for and the kids were allowed to do whatever they wanted on Christmas.  That has left Karl and Kalissa coming home…Kelli does sometimes too but Buck and Kayla are always with their in-laws.  We never wanted them to have to choose and never wanted them to not be able to have their own Christmas with their individual families.  Christmas is stressful enough without having the stress of multiple Christmas’.

So here’s how we spent our time…

If you didn’t know, the Midwest was hit with bad storms on Thursday and Friday…into Saturday this week.  Karl came over on Saturday and blew snow for me.  Oh, I love that guy.

He ended up staying.  I was busy prepping for the next day.

After he came in, we decided to make a batch of tamales.  It’s become our tradition.  Ever since Karl lived in Houston, he’s asked me to make them.  I know little about it but this year, we made the best tamales ever!!  I’m finally feeling more confident about making them.

The weather wasn’t the best so all the churches around us canceled church.  Karl declared that it wouldn’t be Christmas if there was no Silent Night sung like at Candlelight services.  So we improvised.  I made some candle holders out of cardstock and we put birthday candles in them.

Gannon’s caught on fire and I quickly retrieved it from him.  It was all good in the end.

Here are two sweet pictures of Gannon…  He wasn’t feeling the best with his cold but still had a smile to share.

He’s back on the uphill swing and I’m thankful for that.  We did lose a lot with him over the days he’s been sick.  We’re back to regular tube feedings.  It’s our hope that next week will be better.

Karl and I finally played Patchwork.  Oh, my word.  We love it!  It’s a board game for only two players.  It only takes about 30 minutes to play.  There is a lot of strategy to it.  If you like Tetris you’d like this game.  It’s not hard to learn to play.  You can find it HERE on Amazon.  I highly recommend it.

Karl and I will be playing LOTS more of this.

Craig and the boy gave Kalissa a mother’s ring for Christmas.

Santa brought the boys Top Gun shirts.  They loved them…They got Jenga too so brought that over to play.

Kramer’s old boss brought me a ham for Christmas.  We cooked it up and tried to make a dent in it.  The ham was HUGE.  We’ll be eating all my favorite things including scalloped potatoes and ham and split pea soup…ham and beans probably too.  YUM!!

Karl beat me at chess this year.  It’s an annual thing.  It was one of the longer games we’ve ever played…so fun!

Karl and Craig started playing yet another new board game.  This is called Century.  There are several different versions.  They love THIS ONE.

After the game wrapped up, everyone went home and I wrote this blog post.  We have some family things planned for the next couple of days so yes, I wrote a couple of blog posts on Christmas.  It happens.

I’ll tell you more about our family plans later in the week.  We had a great day…very low-key but I loved it…and I ended the evening with a little bit of stitching.

Before I go…here’s a reminder:

I will be doing a Facebook/Youtube live on Wednesday the 28th at 7pm CENTRAL time.   I sent out an event notice on Facebook.  If you have questions that you want me to ask, feel free to leave them in the comments or email me.  If you leave a comment please say:  “Live Question” and then ask it.  That way those can easily be flagged so I can answer them.  This will be recorded and you’ll be able to watch it later.