Night Before Christmas

We spent this year's Christmas Eve at the Piercy family party in Castle Rock. It was hosted by Aunt Julie and Uncle Kevin this time around. Lots and lots of Jillian's relatives showed up. And Santa made an appearance, too!

Jillian wore her pretty Christmas dress to the party, though it wasn't long before the sweater came off. She was working up a sweat running around with Rielee and others. While playing downstairs, we heard a knock at the door and all of the kids screaming. We ran upstairs to find that Santa had arrived. Just like the first two encounters, Jillian didn't want to get anywhere close to Santa. She preferred to watch him from a distance. But, she did get a present from Santa ... in fact, she got a candy cane from him, so maybe she thought that he wasn't all that bad?

Then it came time to open presents from under the Christmas tree. One of the things that got Jillian really excited was a big box of princess stuff from Cousin Rielee, which included several pretty princess dresses. Jillian immediately stripped her clothes off, and started yelling for us to put her into one of the dresses. Even later after we put jam-jams on her, she still wanted to wear one of the dress-bottoms over the top of her pants.

Jillian received many cool presents, and she really got into tearing the wrapping paper off each one. She's old enough now that she gets pretty excited when opening presents, knowing that there's something new inside. All that excitement wore her out, because she was deliriously tired at the end of the evening.