Family Christmas Party no. 1

Saturday was my family Christmas party. My family is too big to hold the party in one person's home, so my parents started renting a place to host it a few years ago. My father has continued that tradition for the past two years since my mother died. This year was no different, but what was different was that there was a big ice storm in the midwest on Monday of last week. One of the hardest hit places was Oklahoma, where my brother and his family live. They were without power for 5 days, and sadly had to cancel coming to the party. So they weren't there, and then on Saturday the weather forecast was for 10 to 17 inches of snow to hit with blowing snow. They were calling for a blizzard warning. This scared off my sister and her family, so she and none of my nieces and nephews and their children were there for the party either. Needless to say, there was a small turnout, and in addition to that, DH and I decided we needed to leave on Saturday afternoon instead of staying overnight and coming home Sunday to beat the blowing snow. We left and our two older girls were none too happy. Gracie slept the entire way home, which was good, because the weather was really bad. DH wouldn't have been able to handle the stress of staying on the road and a screaming baby that wanted out of her carseat. So, although the party was okay, it was somewhat of a bust this year. I guess you can't expect every year to be beter than the last. This was one of those years where it wasn't. I just hope that this isn't shades of the future, where we won't have good turnouts for the party.

We also did something way different this year than in past years. As I mentioned we have a really large family. I have 4 brothers, and 2 sisters, all of which have children, children's spouses, and/or  grandchildren. So you can imagine how hard it is to maintain a gift exchange. One of my brothers has done a great job every year figuring out how to make it work, but this year with agreement from everyone we decided to cut back on gifts for each other and dontate gifts to a family that needed help. My SIL found a local family through my father's church; a mother with 9 children and one on the way. She had some bad things happen to her in the recent past, and was really down on her luck. Each of us were given a child to buy for and then we wrapped gifts at the party. My SIL was to take the gifts to church on Sunday afternoon, where the mom would pick them up later. We had quite alot of gifts for the family, and it was nice to be able to help out the family.

We still had the gift exchange for the children in our family, so noone really felt left out. But as much as I liked the idea of helping this family, I have to admit that it changed the whole feel of our family party. It wasn't a bad change, but a change.

Lastly, the other thing that was different was that we didn't get to go ice skating as part of the celebration, as we usually do. We didn't because we had to leave early, but it turns out that noone did because the city changed their rules about out-of-towners paying to skate. It was just too expensive. So that not only changed this year's party, but will change parties from now on. We'll have to figure out some other way to get together. It seems that change is in the air for our family!

This is the first of two family Christmas parties for us. The 2nd will be with DH's family this Saturday. It is at our house and is waaaay smaller. DH's family consists of the 5 of us, his mom and dad, his sister, BIL, niece and nephew-in-law. A total of 11 people. A nice size for a party at our house. We're doing chili instead of a more traditional meal. There won't be a Santa, but we will exchange gifts. It should be a fun time with Gracie around this year, and I'm looking forward to it.