Merry Christmas!!!

As a Jew I was raised, like most, celebrating Christmas day with Chinese food and a movie. Limited with choices, this option was quite enjoyable. When I got older and started making plans of my own, the only thing that changed was that Chinese food became Japanese Food and Christmas Eve became an annual event celebrated with my cousins. I began to look forward to the holiday almost as much as a child waiting for Santa.
Then I had children and though the holiday season is even more enjoyable when experienced with kids (particularly your own) the movie and dinner plan goes right out the window. Hoping to have an activity for our kids combined with the need to entertain (since our annual NYE party is on a temporary hiatus), we decided to host a Christmas Day Brunch. Promising myself and Todd that I would not go overboard with my entertaining-ism's, I tried to keep it relatively low key. 4 pounds of lox and smoked whitefish salad and 24 adults later, our brunch was off and running.
The night before at the annual cousins dinner, which is worthy of posting itself due to its good time and its expected laughter, I honestly bugged out a little bit. It dawned on me after a few glasses of wine and some slivers of raw fish, that we were going to have 17 children, 16 under the age of 4, in our home the following morning. I saw chaos, and crying, and whining, and chaos. Being one who often welcomes chaos, even I saw this as maybe too much. But, the party went on.
Not unlike other parties, it went off well. No crying, no whining, no chaos, nothing but a good time, seemingly had by all. The number of children was not overwhelming, nor was the number of adults. The amount of whitefish salad leftover, well, that is truly overwhelming.
Unfortunately, I do not have any good pictures of the event, hopefully some of our guests do. And, we will likely make it an annual event, at least until we return to our NYE celebration.
As far as my ism's on a scale of 1-10 I would say I kept it to about a 5 or 6. Yes, I set the tablescape the night before, and yes all the plates were marked, but I only cooked one thing, and kept the menu pretty basic. It was a fun day for me, Todd, our kids and our friends, and since I take the responsibility of other people's good times very seriously, that is a very good thing.