In years to come, you'll look back at all these posts and photos and will remember some of your earliest Christmas memories. We hope that recording funny
details and silly stories here will be another gift for you, one day. So, here goes! Ollie, your excitement has been mounting for weeks and weeks. On December 1st, you and Maddie each got a personal email from Santa, with a video from him showing your actual photo in his "good book" way up at the North Pole. You were quite struck with this video message, a bit taken aback, really... partway through watching it, you looked up at me and said, "Santa knows everything." All this month, we've been talking about Christmas and Santa and being a good boy - once or twice, Daddy even had to call Santa from his cell phone to let him know that you were teetering close to the edge of bad boy status. You were not happy when it came to this, but the 
truth is, you are one of the best boys on the planet, and your ocassional slip-ups could never really set you back. Early on, you decided that you'd like to ask Santa for a baby dinosaur for Christmas, and soon after, you added "lemon holder" to your wish list. Yes, a lemon holder. We know you like the flavor of lemons, but even we were surprised with this unusual request - a request that persisted right up until Christmas day. We just had to wait and see if Santa would be able to meet such a wish. Maddie, meanwhile- you're still too young to know what's coming from day to day, but I will say that as it approached, we'd exclaim, "Christmas is coming!" and you would respond excitedly, "Yay!!!!" So you must have known something was up.After nearly a week in Maine, it was Christmas Eve, and the excitement reached a fever pitch. In fact, you were so overcome that you barely
made it through dinner, Ollie, and Daddy took you to the sofa to lie down, where you promptly fell asleep, just before 7pm. Maddie soon followed, and your dad and I had an unexpected super-relaxed evening with the rest of the family while you both slept upstairs. We had dessert, then moved to the living room for our Christmas Eve pajama-present opening (you were both sorely missed for this), Grandma's famous glug, and our traditional reading of A Child's Christmas in Wales. It's one of the most peaceful times of the year, sitting all together and sharing that beautiful story aloud, a story that fills your mind with such vivid images and your 
heart with the wonder and whimsy of childhood. You'll enjoy it differently each year as you grow up, and you can remember that it connects you to so many generations of your family. I can still see and hear my grandfather reading it aloud, and this year Grandma Patty read it masterfully, probably hearing her father's voice in her own head all the while.Eventually, we all headed back to our little house down the road, which had gotten a bit chilly from neglected woodstoves. We hung up the stockings and left out treats for Santa and his reindeer, and were amazed in the
morning to discover that, once again, he had remembered to fill the stockings here, but leave all the big presents at Grandma and Granddaddy's house. How he keeps track of all this, we'll never know. After inspecting the contents of your stockings, and having a great webcam with Grandma Carole in England (Granddad was outside tending to his dead car battery, poor thing), we sped over to G&G's house to meet your cousins and Ian and Suz and have a great frenzy of stocking-opening (see photo). Ollie, your stocking included a stuffed hedgehog, an old-fashioned tabletop bell, like you might see at a post office, a chocolate Santa, a 
Chuggington bowl, a make-it-yourself straw kit, a mini Simon game, a kaleidescope, and more! Maddie, yours included a shiny gold zip-up bag and some sparkley play necklaces, a can of spray foam soap with a duck dispensor on top, a little soft babydoll and an even littler ballerina doll, a wind-up robot girl, hair bands, cute socks, and more! We all bounded downstairs to a big breakfast of cheese-sausage-egg strata (a new favorite!), coffee, juice, and Grandma's wonderful stollen and Finnish coffee bread (Mommy's favorite). After that, we spent ALL morning opening presents in the big living room. We fantasize about opening one present at a time and admiring them all slowly, but that never happens, does it? Maddie's favorite presents this year were your babydoll and stroller and little toy purse, and Ollie's favorites were a huge Playmobil airplane, a 
toy cash register with shopping basket accessories, and a remote controlled Robo-Raptor (who makes an appearance in the group photo). The rest of the day was spent playing and playing, and getting ready for our big dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, which was somehow even more delicious than usual this year. Loads of Christmas cookies for dessert, and then two VERY sleepy lambs heading back home to a cozy, happy sleep. Ollie and Maddie, thank you for making Christmas day, and every day, so joyful for us. xoxoxo
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