Ten Things Tuesday - Christmas Edition

Since Christmas is just a few days (3!!) away, I figured I'd do this one Christmas-style

1. Ever since I can remember, I can't seem to sleep on Christmas Eve..I'm that excited that I just can't fall asleep.  Do you know how hard it is to sit there and watch the hours go by knowing just in the other room there are presents to be opened?
2. Because of this, I would always want to get up at the crack of dawn. My mom always made me wait until at least 6:00 am, but the first year we were married, Chris got up with me at 4:30 am!  Since then, I've made myself wait until at least 5:30 because that makes for a long day when you have so much family to see!
3. My boys have yet to wake me up.  I wake them up every year.  In fact, Nixon's first Christmas (he was 3 months old), I woke him up and he was so cranky, we sent him back to bed while Landon opened up all his gifts.  Nixon woke up about time Landon was finishing and then enjoyed his gifts very much from that point on.
4. We have a couple of Christmas traditions for our family.  The first one is that we buy our tree first thing the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving.  While it's falling out outside, I clean the house and put out the decorations, while Chris works on the outside lights.  We're usually done late that afternoon and we bring the tree in to decorate.  We always eat pizza while we do this and watch a Christmas movie of some sort.
5. The second tradition is we each open up one present on Christmas Eve.  It always holds a brand new pair of pajamas so we all look pretty for the video and pictures the next morning!
6. Every year since we moved to Johnston County, we go see Lights on the Neuse.  It consists of about a 30 minute hay ride through woods and around a farm.  They have big lights up with Christmas music playing.  The lights move to the beat of the music.  They also have a building with old time candy and hot chocolate and Santa is usually there for pictures.
7. This will be the first Christmas that Chris & I don't do presents for each other.  We still have our stockings, but we agreed that we'd rather spend our money on stuff for the house if and when we get it.
8. I started listening to Christmas music the week of Thanksgiving.  That's all I've been listening to since then!
9. My favorite Christmas movies are "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," "A Christmas Story," Elf," and "It's a Wonderful Life."
10. Christmas is so much more special when you see the excitement and joy in a child's eyes.