Christmas Fun

I think Christmas really started last Thursday in our home. I feel like that is the point I had cleaned up from our Thanksgiving trip and I had recovered enough that I could look forward to the next holiday.  We made and delivered some Christmas treats to a few neighbors. This was a real event because it was soooooo cold (single digits!) and we had to bundle Emily up really well.  Christmas is such a wonderful excuse to get to know people better!

We completely rearranged our living room/kitchen to make space for a Christmas tree (the picture shows our progress-not the finished product).  I do love having the Christmas tree up!

Emily loves staring at the tree.  Or at least she looks at it just as much as she does everything else in our room.  Andrew caught her staring at it one morning and took this picture with the lights in her eyes because I mentioned the night before that would be cute.

We put together care packages for our mission serving brothers (Derick – if you happen to be reading this before you open your package skip the picture :)).  We had this brilliant idea to trace Emily’s hands to make reindeer antlers.  When she fell asleep in Andrew’s lap we thought it would be a perfect opportunity.  It was A LOT of work and it took us awhile to figure out how to trace her hands well.  Hence one of the reindeer falling off the page.  I wouldn’t normally take pictures of letters, but there was no way to recreate a third reindeer from Emily’s hands and I wanted to at least preserve our efforts.

There are a lot of really cool Christmas traditions in the area.  The first that we went to was last Saturday.  Main Street is turned into Victorian England and The Christmas Carol is acted out throughout the day at different locations up and down the street. I loved it! But again it was only 10 degrees so we were freezing and didn’t think it would be wise to get Emily out of her car seat/stroller. We went to one scene and then raced back to the warmth of our home before Emily woke up.

Yesterday Emily took a really good nap (I think it is a lingering side effect of the shots she got on Tuesday) and I started, completed, and cleaned up after a sewing project! I got this idea that it would be cool to have stockings up but I didn’t want to lug Emily around trying to find some.  So, I cut up one of Andrew’s shirts, made up a pattern, and got to work.  I think if we had 10 more kids I would have had a perfect stocking, but the three that I made turned out cute enough.

I was really pleased to realize they already had a place to be hung.

On Monday we watched the Christmas Devotional.  I LOVED the music and the messages.  I feel like it is such a great start to the Christmas season and helps me put the focus on Christ.

I also recently discovered (like two minutes ago) a super cool collection of resources for creating a Christ centered Christmas. I am particularly excited about the dramatized version of the novel A Christmas Carol that is available to stream online (and I realize that this book isn’t directly related to Christ, but it does have an important message).  Emily and I spend a lot of time just walking around our little apartment during the day and this will be a nice addition to our pacing.

More Christmas fun to come!