Our traditional Christmas letter was quite solemn this year...
Christmas Tree Set-Up: by Mom, Rachel, & Nate
Santa's Yearly Visit to the Clifton Community Center. This year it was just Nate, Rachel, & I (Rachel opted out of being in the picture this year), quite the change from the first year we moved to this area in 2016. While attending this year I had a friend tell me that she remembered the first year we were here (which was 2016) and we got our pictures taken in our cute reindeer Christmas pajamas. I had forgotten about that picture so I came home and found it. What fun memories!!!
Larry Ward Family 2016
The Annual Harold B. Lee Elementary Christmas Program. I can't believe that Nate is my last one to go through this amazing elementary school. He participated in the honor choir this year so he sang in several of the songs that were performed. He really enjoyed it up until they had the final long practice and he had to miss his recess time.😏Here is a picture and a couple of the videos from the performance.
Rachel's Annual Dance Performance. Rachel has been dancing with Noelle's dance team since we moved here in 2016. Being part of this team has been a great blessing in Rachel's life. Sorry the videos got cut off. I ran out of storage space on my phone.
After dinner we watched our traditional Luke 2 followed by writing down our gifts to give to baby Jesus. I wanted to keep things light this year so for our traditional Christmas pj's I gave everybody "What About Bob T-Shirts" and we watched the movie "What About Bob" which was one of Larry's favorite movies. I missed hearing his laugh during the movie, but it was fun to watch it and remember some of the good memories and laughs that we shared together.
My original plan was for the kids to get up on Christmas morning, open their stockings, go to church at 10:30 and then come home and open presents. When I mentioned the idea, I thought their was going to be mutiny in the house, not by my 9 year old son, but rather by my 22 year old son, Spencer. He told me that I was ruining all of the fun of Christmas and that he wanted to open presents first thing in the morning! So the deal was that everybody had to be ready for church by 9 so that we would have 1 hour to open presents. It actually worked pretty well. Some of the gifts that were exchanged included...
A book called "Life is a Journey: Hardships to Blessings"written by Colten J. Skinner, a fellow warrior who also has ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T). I can't wait to read it! I love inspirational books.
As a family we received the book called "The Walnut Tree". It is the story of the pulpit being built in the tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I just recently learned that our business partners, Ben and Brad Banks, were the ones who built the pulpit.
Our family loves to play games together. After playing this fun game "Word On The Street" at our friends house Santa decided that we needed one of our own.
Molly received a sewing machine. As Molly is so incredibly creative and talented, we are expecting great creations to come from this!
Much to their mother's dismay, my boys have gotten into motorcycle riding (ugh!). Enoch and Molly went in together and surprised Spencer with a helmet and a very high quality headphone set that goes inside of the helmet. Spencer was very pleasantly and happily surprised.
Bekah designed and had printed matching sweatshirts for her and Ben.
Each of the younger four children received one of these memory books where you open it up and it plays the video of Larry's life that was played at his funeral. At the end of the video I had them put an audio recording of the last father's blessing that Larry gave to them, which he gave just a few days before he passed.
Gifts from Aunt Tina. My Aunt Tina, who is super busy and has seven children of her own, gave each of us a box full of gifts which included an ornament, with the following poem on it for each of us. We are so grateful for the Aunt Tina's in our lives.
My favorite gift was the one that Spencer gave to Molly which was a love song he wrote for her.
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