The Organ Family: Johnson Christmas 2011

Christmas Day was spent with my family. We did our normal Christmas morning routine: opened a few gifts, ate breakfast, opened the rest of the gifts.

My Aunt Sara and her boyfriend came over mid-morning to spend the day with us. We spent the rest of the day eating, laughing, opening our stockings, and of course taking lots of pictures. The annual Johnson Family Photo Shoot was a lot of fun (I will reveal those photos in a later post), but the most exciting thing this year was finding out what was in our stockings.

In the past years it always seemed like everyone was always scurrying around last minute to buy junk to fill the stockings. So this year we started a new tradition. Instead of buying things to put in every one's stockings, you could only fill the stockings with items that were free. They could be re-gifted items, buy one get one free items, free samples, etc., but they had to be FREE!

Last Christmas we drew names so each person would only have to fill one person's stocking. That gave us a full year to find our free items. Some of the stocking stuffers were hotel toiletries, single flavored tea bags, restaurant mints, lotions, tools, a $25 Chili's gift card, fishing lures, food items such as hot sauces, soup mix, BBQ sauce & rub and that's just to name a few.

It was so much fun to see what people came up with to put in the stockings. There was a ton of great & creative things. I wish I would have thought to take a picture of all the free loot. Oh well, there's always next year.

Anyway, here are some pictures from Christmas Day:

First picture of the morning. It is a horrible picture of Mike and I, but McKinley was obviously excited that Santa had come!

Another "not so great" picture, but what do you expect when everyone first rolls out of bed.

Another new tradition we started this year was "Finding the Pickle". Again my Mother's idea, evidently this tradition started in Germany. Someone hides the "Pickle Ornament" in the tree amongst all the other ornaments, then whoever finds it Christmas morning wins a prize. In our case, the prize was $20, but we decided that the winner should sign & date the $20 bill and then store it with the pickle that way we will always know who found the pickle each year.

This was actually a lot of fun. We had all forgotten about looking for it until my husband thought he would try to be like one of the sneaky people on Survivor looking for an immunity idol. I thought Mike had gotten up to go get more coffee until I look over and see him searching the tree. He probably had been looking for a good 4 or 5 minutes before any of us caught on. I can only imagine what it looked like to have 4 adults scouring this artificial tree for a pickle. In the end Mike was the winner.

This year there were several handmade gifts given. My sister learned how to crochet and made these matching Infinity Scarves for McKinley and me. They are so cute!