Christmas Eve

We celebrated Christmas Eve with a smaller, scaled down Swedish smorgas board - just a jar of sill, spare ribs, ham, cabbage salad, cheese, and hard bread. 
Before we dug into the delicacies we headed outside for a family picture - it is not that often that 20 of us are all in one place, so it was definitely worth a few minutes of cajoling and orchestrating.
After a fun dinner, we headed to Carmel and Christmas Eve service. The cousins participated in the Living Nativity and graced more Facebook pages and email inboxes than we could count as 'everyone' snapped a picture as they walked by commenting on the angelic Mary, the giggling shepherds and the fancy Kings.

Back home, we enjoyed Christmas desserts and cookies before everyone headed to bed, in preparation for the Christmas Day celebration.