Getting ready for Christmas...

We decorated our house...

We chose our tree...

"This one!" declared Alathea. 

She chose our very 1st ever live tree!

And was pretty proud of herself!

We made our gingerbread house... 

We decorated cookies with friends...

We spent a morning in uptown looking at the decorations...

We read Christmas stories and did an advent calendar almost every day...

We decorated ornaments at our friends house...

And now we're waiting, waiting, waiting!

It's amazing Christmas is now just over a day away! We take the Christmas season pretty seriously around here, listening to Christmas music and decorating the house the day after Thanksgiving. I actually started really early this year, doing my Christmas shopping and ordering Christmas cards in October. I'm sooo grateful I did though...it's helped me enjoy this month so much more than I did last year running around like crazy to get everything done.

Christmas was HUGE growing up and I think my family had every Christmas tradition known to man. Its been amazing getting to start some of our own with our little family. God is so kind to have given me an amazing mother whom I know get to emulate :) I've done everything the easy way...just making sugar cookies, buying a gingerbread kit (my Mom made it all from scratch), getting tons of books on Christmas from the library, etc. 

One highlight this year was getting our 1st ever real tree! We've always had a little four foot fake charlie brown tree. But now I don't think we could ever go back! We LOVE having a real one. Alathea loves it too. I catch her just gazing at it throughout the day. She did a great job picking it out and took her job pretty seriously.

 Another favorite this year has been getting the girls the "Little People Nativity" Set. It wasn't cheap, but both Joe & I agree it was a very worthwhile investment. It's really given Alathea a hands on way to comprehend the story of Christ's birth. She seems to comprehend a good bit and its sweet to see her now acting out the nativity scene with her stuffed animals. She's always Mary and her honey is baby Jesus. She usually makes Daddy Joseph, and Abi is a sheep, and I get the privilege of holding the star over the manger :)

My favorite thing of all so far was going to a live nativity with some friends at a local church. Seeing Alathea's face as she saw the story of Christ's birth was priceless. She was literally in awe of "baby Jesus". I will never forget the way the baby captured her attention...and its sparked many a prayer that Jesus himself would capture her heart the way it did in the enactment that night.

With all the fun and festivities we've had, we did have one disaster :) We headed to McAddenville last night, as we have every other year, to see the lights. Alathea was quite excited about this. We ended up sitting in traffic for 1 1/2 hours to go 1/2 mile with no lights in sight! We talked to a cop who told us the lights were still a good 2 hour wait ahead. This had never happened to us before. We already had two screaming kids as it was, so we sadly turned around and went home. 

Little "disasters" like this are good heart checks for me that I don't get too caught up in memory making to forget the true meaning of Christmas myself.