Christmas Eve Celebration Each Christmas eve each of our grandchildren is dressed in a Christmas dress or Christmas vest or cummerbund and tie. Brother and Sister wear coordinating fabrics. A month or two prior to Christmas, formal portraits are taken of the children in their Christmas attire at Sears and the pictures are the gifts to the parents. The evening begins around 5:00 p.m. with pictures of the children with their parents, with santa's reindeer, with the other children or by themselves. At about 6:00 p.m. we serve a prime rib dinner. The tables are set with the Christmas china. The place cards are santa gift tags glued to plain folded index cards. After dinner, the children play games. They play pin the nose on the snowman, reindeer hot potato, musical reindeer (played like musical chairs), marble roll, etc. Each child receives a prize after each game. The last game is a Christmas dance to Santa Claus music with the children playing musical instruments and the adults shaking bells to the rhythm of the music. We then wheel all of the Christmas stockings out to the family room in a Radio Flyer Red Wagon. Each year, one of the youngest children is placed in the wagon with the stockings while the older children pull the wagon from the bedroom, where it has been hidden, to the family room. Each item in the stockings has been wrapped with a generous amount of tape to buy time. The children help to distribute the stockings. While the children and adults open their stockings, Santa Claus prepares to make his entrance. At about the time the children have finished opening all their little presents in the stockings, Santa Claus knocks on the front door. The children run to the front door in the living room and the oldest grandchild opens the door for Santa. Santa comes in and distributes the toys and poses for a few pictures, then exits. The packages under the tree are distributed to family members and opened. After the package opening, dessert is served. The children play Christmas card games and board games for a while during and after dessert. Then the parents depart with their children who do not want to leave the Christmas Eve celebration. We have been doing this for a number of years now and it seems to always work well! We take rolls of pictures and we call it our "Country Christmas".