It's Beginning to look like Christmas...Without a Christmas Card

So here's the scoop, I went over to my daughter's to take a photo for their Christmas card.  She had the scene set up so beautifully with a fire in the fireplace, the tree decorated, everyone dressed to a T, each girl's hair fixed just so, Sweet Cheeks still had a rash from an allergy to fruit, but every card's gotta tell a story,  right?  With four kids, it was a major job to get this all set up.  In all honesty she had been working up to this moment all day.  I arrived on time and started snapping away.  You all know the unprofessional quality of my photos, but my philosophy is this: take a ca-zillion pictures and one has to come out right.  I left the flash off, hoping to capture the true ambiance of the fire and the tree.  A warm overall feeling was what I was going for, and the glow was there, believe me.  The only problem was,  by not using the flash the shutter was open too long and every slight movement was caught.  The results were at least one fuzzy person per shot, add to that the fact that you can NEVER get four children and two adults looking favorably at the camera at one time, especially without one of them moving.  I have tons of photos to back up this theory, and here are just a few of the shots to prove it.   The last two were taken with the flash, but as you can tell by this time some were beginning to become uncooperative.  To see just how funny these really are you need to click on each one to enlarge it.  Scooter, in the polka dots has some wicked looking eyes in one of them. 

By the way, there was a card made and it features none of the above photos, but it wasn't exactly perfect either.  If I recall correctly one of these precious dears has a finger up her nose.