The pants in this family

As goofy as we surely looked strolling into Mike's parents' house and later my parents' house on Christmas day, the matching pajama pants that I made for all of us really added a special feeling to the holiday.  That feeling was a combination of cozy, proud, and mildly embarrassed by our cheesiness.

I had hoped to find a couple of coordinating winter prints for this project, ones we could wear all winter long, maybe one print for the guys and another for the girls.  Unfortunately the selection was surprisingly limited.  I opened myself up to all fabrics, Christmas and non-Christmas, and just didn't find much at all.

The red and white pattern I settled on also limited us on shirt color options, and my mostly online search for "same color but different style $15 or less tops" was also disappointing.  So the only variation in our looks was the fact that one pair of kids' pants had the print going vertically while all the others were horizontal, a solution to coming up short on the yardage.  So, I embraced matchy-matchiness.

This tutorial is the one I used for making the pants.  It was pretty simple to follow and even provided a couple of laughs.  These pants were the first garments I have ever made, and sewing up the first crotch with one pant leg right-side-out inside the other was nothing short of a miraculous revelation to me.  I was actually excited to do it three more times.

I didn't plan for us to wear our family uniforms...I mean, pajamas...beyond the couple hours at home while Michael and Sophie opened gifts from Santa, but Mike suggested we keep them on for comfort's sake, at least for the first drive.  I thought we might change mid-morning before the second leg of our Christmas morning journey, but like the Brady Bunch, we decided to keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on...(stole that reference from the witty little tutorial).

Mike and I finally put on real clothes around noon on Christmas day.  We switched the kids into their more formal attire after their naps.  Had I known we would sport these looks for so much of the day, I might have added some sweet accessories.  Like antlers.