Christmas in Pearl River

December 25, 2013

The joy of the Christmas gathering at the Moyles is largely the joy of the children - their excitement and our enjoyment of watching them. This is the group of the nine Moyle grandchildren, which includes our three grandchildren.

Elyse Nave, Ashleigh Nave, Caleb Wells, Bethany Moyle, Jessical Ringo, Jonathan Ringo, Jordan Nave, Josiah Wells, Lindsey Moyle.

Robby and Diane arrive with Caleb and Josiah. Josiah is happy if he has a ball to play with.

After gifts at Jeff's, we all arrived at the Moyle home a little after 10am. Jeff and Leslie arrived soon afterward. These four cousins quickly find something to do together.

We gather around the tree for the first round of gift giving. Brenda and Jeff help Josiah check out a gift.

It was great fun to see the young ones respond to their gifts. There were moments of great beauty like this one with Elyse.

Brenda holds up one of the clever confections that Debbie and Jessica had made. A chocolate-dipped cherry served as the mouse's body with the stem as its tail, and the head was made of a Hershey's kiss.

Darla and Jeff enjoying the gift giving.

This was certainly an electronically-empowered group. There were probably a dozen phone cameras plus pads, video cameras, and digital cameras large and small.

Jonathan, Caleb and Robby constructing things from their gifts.

We were trying to organize a group picture of the kids before dinner, and this was their idea about how to do the picture. But we couldn't get quite all of them in the stack. This was one of my favorite pictures of the day though.

They did cooperate to let us shoot some pictures of all of them together.

We managed to get this large family group into one room for the meal, and we had plenty of food!

After dinner there was the exchange of family stockings, and the final round was a set of gifts from Judy to the families of her children - pillows and crafted candy bowls she had made with a Duck Dynasty calendar thrown in. It was a wonderful day of family fellowship and Brenda and I are very grateful to be taken in by the Moyle family for this Christmas celebration.