Leanne's Little Place: Our Christmas Festivities............

We started off a couple of days before Christmas with exchanging gifts with our dear friend Patty, had a couple of Chrissy drinks was a really nice night. Renee received a gorgeous handmade gift from Lauren, a Scrapbook page of their friendship, you will see her in the pictures with it, was so special and Renee loved it!

Christmas Eve, was at our place. We did the full Christmas lunch for Mum and Kevin, Donna and Ben, before heading up to Waikerie to have Christmas day with Celina. Check out our tree, it really was a money tree this year with all those special envelopes!

After lunch and present opening we headed up to Waikerie with Dad to spend Christmas Eve night and Christmas day with Celina and family. Celina was working until about 9pm, so she managed to get home to see most of the Carols, she is normally working and doesn't get to indulge like that LOL, check out this pic of Renee to the right singing her little heart out!!!

Christmas day started early with us rising at about 6.30am, Jarrod was the only slow one LOL, took a little while to get him moving, even Renee was up early and that's saying something! Was so nice to be able to wake up with Celina Christmas morning, we were kids the last time we did that. It was also really nice to have all the kids together on Christmas morning, this is the first time that this has happened, so was extra special. Only downfall was, was that I forgot the video camera charger....bummer....I had everything else, even remembered to buy extra tapes, I was not happy!!!

Christmas Eve we set a small tree up outside, as Celina's lounge room is quite small, I don't think we would have been able to see the kids for paper otherwise.

So here comes Christmas in pictures. I love the first one, it's Renee dragging Phillip outside to see what Santa has brought them, how cute LOL.

Then came Celina's surprise to her family, Clipsal tickets and merchandise, she was so proud of herself because she actually managed to keep it a secret from all of them!

And then time for Santa to give out the presents from the families to each other.

And the lunch, to the left. Celina and John had also asked John's Aunt and Uncle over for Christmas Dinner, It was Uncle Les's Birthday as well, it was so lovely. Aunty Mary has not long been in a nursing home, so was great that she was able to come out for the day. In a few days this lovely couple will be celebrating 60 years of marriage, amazing, huh! The group photo taken was taken on Renee's new camera. She loves it and was taking photos of every thing, even dishes and dinner being served, she just could become a scrapbooker armed with this device. It's a great little unit with the self timer feature, was so funny waiting for the camera to take the pic, I think you can almost see the anticipation in some of our faces!

Then to finish off here are a couple of pics generally from the day.

We headed home Boxing Day, but not before stopping in on an old family friend. This was totally a blast from the past for me. As kids we grew up knowing Uncle Ted and would knock around with his kids most weekends. He is now in a band and lives out in the bush, he and his partner, Maxine have a lovely set up, having built everything from scratch, no electricity, just generator power, cheap living I guess, but you wouldn't want to forget bread and milk.

The most amazing thing to see was his old Chev Ute. As kids we would be at the drags a lot of weekends watching this old ute race down the track. We would spend hours polishing wheels and to go and see the ute in the shed was very special, really brought out the OOOHH's and the AAHHHH's. However it has changed a little since those days, it now collects wood!!! It almost made me cry seeing it like this LOL.