Whirlwind Christmas

Four years old is a very good age for Christmas. Santa is still very real. Everything is quite magical.

Our Christmas weekend started on Saturday the 23rd with a trip to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Spectacular. For the non New Yorkers this is the big show with the Rockettes that runs for about a month every year. I had never seen it and this was the first time for Danielle as well.

She loved the show. Lots of dancing and Santa running around (the plot involves Santa going to NYC to get Mrs. Claus a present, but the plot isn’t that important). But the show was surprising to me in one sense. In these days of rampant commercialism, this show finishes with a 15 minute nativity story. Nothing commercial about it, the real historical Bible story. I’m sitting here trying to explain Herod instituting a tax that forced everyone to go to their home city which is why Joseph and Mary are going to Bethlehem to a four year old. Needless to say, Danielle thought that part was boring.

But here’s a picture of Danielle enjoying part of the 3-D Santa part of the show:

After the show, we went to my wife’s sister’s place for Christmas. Danielle like to see her two nephews (the soccer players) and her Titi and Tio (aunt and uncle for the Spanish impaired).

She put out cookies for Santa:

She didn’t wake up too early (Christmas present for me), but when she did she went straight for the tree:

She got a scooter for her doll:

But by far her favorite present was her music player. It’s called an FP3 player (presumably the F stands for Fisher-Price), because it doesn’t use the MP3 format. We preloaded it with her favorite Wiggles music and she listened and sang all day.

We followed this up with a trip to my wife’s father’s place (he’s getting up in years and is a bit frail) to see more family. So of course this meant more presents (it’s good to be four).

So we left with a car stuffed full of presents and we came home with a car stuffed full of presents. But we got to spend a lot of time with family so it was a very good Christmas.

Happy holidays to all and a very Happy New Year.