Santa Clause is coming to Town!

Last night was our ward Christmas party. We recently combined wards- I'll update on that later- so there were a lot of new faces there. I wish I had taken more pictures, it was set up beautifully. The program was wonderful too. They retold the Christmas story and had live Nativity along with singing. The youth played the parts and did a fantastic job! The baby Jesus was an actual baby, our friends little guy who is SO CUTE and was so good. The spirit was so strong. I love moments like those where we are able to take some time and think about the real meaning of the season.
Of course afterwards Santa came, and I'll be honest folks, I think he's the real deal. Check out the pictures and decide for yourself. I have to say that I was a little apprehensive about Gabi meeting Santa for the first time, we've never done the Santa thing before for whatever reason. So I tried to prepare her all day yesterday by telling her that she was going to get to see Santa that night. All she was interested in meeting, however, were Santa's reindeer. So as we were waiting in line to meet him I was getting really stressed out. I turned to talk to Isaac and then someone told me that Gabi was sitting on Santa's lap. Apparently she totally cut in front of like 5 kids (she didn't know :)) walked right up to Santa and sat on his lap!! What happened to my shy little girl?! She sat and chatted with him for a bit and loved every minute of it. As you can see from the pictures, Madi wasn't quite as taken with the jolly old man. He was super nice and all of the kids loved him!!