some more and a question

I remember one year of caroling - I think Eric and I were in high school, and when we were in the van between stops, we whistled the whole thing of "Sleigh Bells."

This isn't a memory ... one thing I would like to know is how on earth Mom and Dad kept us all corralled and attentive enough to act out the Nativity every year on Christmas Eve, even when we were all tiny, and as we kept adding more kids to the family so there were always little kids as long as I was home. Clarissa was 4 when I went to Ricks, and 7 when I left on my mission - there were ALWAYS little kids at our house as long as I was there. Anyway, I can't get my kids to pay attention for 5 seconds on Christmas Eve to anything at all about the Nativity, no matter how much I've talked it up ahead of time and avoided any mention of the present-fest the next morning. So what was it? Or are we just not remembering any Christmas Eve disasters or fights? We keep trying to do something - ANYTHING - about the Nativity on Christmas Eve, but we haven't had much luck. We got a really nice book of paintings with scriptures from a friend when we lived in DC (her brother was the artist - look up Joseph Brickey), and we go through that on Christmas Eve instead of trying to act everything out.

Oh, and speaking of the Nativity - there's one that makes me smile ... the year Eric and Laurel got married, I think they spent Christmas with us. (Or was it the next year, also with Jared and Michelle?) Anyway, it was Laurel's first Christmas with us, and she was the angel for the Nativity pageant. She wore a dress that fit Mindy as a 10-year-old and it was a little small but she could totally get into it. Crazy. She put gold garland in her hair and stood on a chair for her lines. Good initiation into that Palmer tradition for her, I thought.