Christmas Day extended

We scheduled the Lewis cousins gift exchange on Monday the 26th in the middle of the day, rather than on the traditional time we have held it on Christmas later afternoon or evening. From my perspective, this had several advantages:
1) Allowing our nuclear families to have more time to celebrate Christmas in their own smaller group
2) Making Christmas Day (and this year, the Sabbath Day) less hectic
3) Making travel mostly in daylight
4) Giving the cousins and extended family a more relaxed time together.
5) Extending the joy of Christmas another day.

In our way to Ogden, we dropped Michael off in Salt Lake. Then we had a Christmas visit with my sister Dorothy for a few minutes at her home.

We arrived at Alison’s right at noon. There was a nice menu prepared, with some of the best home-made soups I have ever tasted as center piece–broccolli and cheese, Italian sausage and potato (like at Olive Garden but with more sausage), and taco soup. Nathan loved the soups, we think. He had a bowl of each of the varieties in turn. Then he finished with his fourth bowl which had some of all three kinds with a big plop of guacamole and sour cream all stirred together.

I was pleased to make this a book Christmas with our gifts to the grandchildren and hope that they will find the Church books we gave to be useful. We tried as best we could to pitch the particular book gifts their individual age and interests. I was also please to make a gift to each couple of our three volumes of Lewis family history that we just published.

The highlight of the day was connecting to David’s family in Massachusetts with Skype. With Scott helping on the set up, we used our laptop and projected the image onto a large screen. The whole group here in Utah crowded into the Soderquist’s family room and gave very happy and enthusiastic responses to things the Lewis boys did as they opened their presents from their cousins.

On our way back home in the early evening we spent a few minutes each with Brian, with Hilary’s family and saw Wendy’s mother, Annette.