Christmas 2018

After our return from Okinawa we were excited for the Christmas Season.  I quickly put up the tree and decorated the house to get us in a festive mood.  The tree takes up 1/10 of our living space but its still important to me to have a real Christmas in Japan.  The base does a great job of having holiday events and multiple opportunities to see Santa.  Our first Santa siting was at our school's holiday extravaganza put on the PTO.  One of the 4th grade teachers volunteers to be Santa and he is the best you will see here.  I canceled a date night just to attend this event with Santa!  This is probably the last year I can talk Hayden into a picture with him while Lincoln was all for it and had no trouble telling Santa what he wanted this year.

Our next event was the Kindergarten Winter Celebration.  All 4 of the Kinder classes sang Christmas Carols.  Lincoln had a special part as an angel in one of the songs.  I'm sure he was happy to be singing songs in English this year!

The Bowling Alley had a holiday party including Santa a couple weeks before Christmas.  We had fun bowling and Lincoln made an ornament.

The weekend before Christmas, we booked a room at the New Sanno, the military hotel in Tokyo.  We visited the Roppongi Hills German Christmas Market and Midtown Light Show which was really cool!

We hosted a Polar Express Playdate for Lincoln and two of his buddies.  The boys had fun painting a Christmas tree, decorating gingerbread men, and watching the Polar Express.  Hayden went out to lunch with daddy but came back and decorated a cookie at least. 

Christmas Eve we went to the service at the chapel and prepared for Santa's arrival later that night.  The boys were super excited and enjoyed throwing oats for the reindeer in the yard and putting out cookies and milk for Santa.

Christmas Day the boys had to wait in their rooms until 7:00 to come downstairs.  We started with stockings and then took turns opening gifts.  Hayden's big gift from Santa was a laptop and Lincoln got a large lego set.  We had a surprise from mommy and daddy that came later in the morning.  We were also able to facetime with both our families after opening gifts.

In case you didn't know, Eric found out he passed his oral boards in September.  He received a certificate in the mail that I had framed as one of his gifts.  He put a lot of hard work into preparing and studying for the boards and flying overseas to take them only made it that much harder.  So proud of you E! 

Oh and we didn't forget our Elf, Boo.  He made his appearance right after Thanksgiving and we said goodbye to him on Christmas Eve.  He had some fun around the house.  One day he was on the back of the toilet in the tissue box (the house is small, I run out of options).  Hayden said it was weird because he was watching you go to the bathroom.  Yeah, I guess that is weird but so is an elf that moves about the house so there.  The boys still have fun with it so we'll keep that tradition going as long as we can.