Christmas Eve 2011

This is what I've been waiting for since Abby was born.  It's so fun that she is old enough to understand holidays and we can start making new family traditions with our little Abby.  :) 

This year, my family came over on Christmas Eve.  My dad is in Australia with Ruby and her family but we had my mom, Kirk and Lucy join us this year at our house.  So as Ruby put it, even though our family was divided, we still got to spend it together.  :)  Lucy just moved here from Sydney so we were so happy to have her join us for her first Chen Christmas.  I hope she doesn't think we typically indulge the way we did.  :)

To begin with, Bryce made a Cuban style fresh ham.  It was approximately 13 lbs of delicious pig shoved full of one head of garlic and then smothered in a citrus garlic mojo before being cooked/smoked in low indirect heat for 6 hours.  He also made Cuban black beans with saffron basmati rice and roasted some carrots.  Kirk made my favorite green bean casserole which I look forward to every holiday.  I even finally got to use my Christmas plates for the first time too!  Everything was so delicious. 

Before

After

Cheers!

 

Then we had to make chewy chocolate chip cookies for Santa and they were delicious as usual.  Bryce loves chocolate chip cookies and according to him, so does Santa so that worked out perfectly.  We were able to kill two birds with one stone.  :P

I made these sort of huge.  This recipe yields 2 dozen cookies but I only made 18.  Ginormously good.

Abby imitating her Jo Jo.

(Look!  She let us put her hair up in a ponytail!  A Christmas miracle!)

Everybody OPEN GIFTS!

Abby got a cloth sandwich set and she and Daddy were chowin' down.

Abby taste testing a chocolate chip cookie.  Does she think Santa will like it?  YES!

Before going to bed, we left a cookie and milk out for Santa by the chimney, read The Night Before Christmas and went to bed.  It was a perfect way to end a perfect day.  :)