Christmas 2012

 We had such a great Christmas this year! I'm a huge fan of traditions. Every year we do about the same thing but it is something my kids will remember forever. As always, we go the weekend after Thanksgiving to pick out our tree:

Then we put up this bad boy and the Christmas Elf sneaks in at night to put a fun activity in the pocket for our family to do that day. The kids get so excited to wake up and see what we get to do!

I didn't take a picture for all 12 activities but here are the ones I have:

Go visit Santa

Make Reindeer Food

Ready to sprinkle for Christmas Eve

Pajama Dance Party to Christmas Music

This activity is so easy and is always one of our favorites. I took some hilarious videos of us doing our seperate dances for the dance off. Unfortunately I won't be posting those...

Pick out an ornament for the year

Every Christmas we take the kids to the fancy ornament store and let them pick out an ornament for that year. This year was a little crazy. I helped Kai and Delaney while Trent helped Crew. Kai was holding his by the string when it untied, dropped on the floor, and broke a piece off the bottom. We went to tell the lady that worked there at the same time to see Trent telling her that Crew had broken an oranament. Talk about embarrasing. We told her that we wanted to buy the two broken ornaments as Delaney was trying to decide between two that she loved. The lady who worked there told us that she would help Delaney decide by giving her one as a gift. You couldn't tell that Kai's had broken so she wrapped his up and then grabbed a new ornament that matched Crew's broken one and told us that because we had been honest that she wouldn't make us pay for it. She told us that lots of people break ornaments in that store and that most of them just leave the broken ones on the shelf and don't say anything. When we left I looked at the receipt and she had only charged us for one of the 4 ornaments we left with. I returned to the store to tell her of the mistake. She smiled and said "there is no mistake. Merry Christmas!"  She is a saint. It was such a great way to teach our children the blessings you can receive from being honest.

Gingerbread Train?

 By the time we went to the store to pick out our Gingerbread House there were only broken ones left so we came home with a Gingerbread TRAIN.  We proceeded to decorate while singing "gingerbread train, a gingerbread train" over and over to the tune of "Dinosaur Train." (You will only know what I am talking about if you have toddlers who watch PBS Kids.)

Our work of art

 We made Caramel Apples this year to deliver to the neighbors. Don't be offended if you didn't get one.... I bought enough to do several batches (we have lots of great neighbors) then got too exhausted after the first batch to finish the rest. Basically the first 10 people who opened the doors when we knocked got one. Sheesh...December wears me out.

 We decorated homemade sugar cookies for us and Santa.

On Christmas Eve we opened our Christmas jammies and acted out the Nativity Story from the Bible:

 Then sprinkled our reindeer food on the snow-less lawn while wearing Daddy's shoes

And left out cookies and milk with some carrots for the reineer that got eaten up by morning.

Like I said, it was a great Christmas!