Pre-Christmas festivities.

I feel like I missed a lot of pictures of the Christmassy activities we did this year, but this is a sampling:

Cutting down our Christmas tree.  I love this tradition!  This was the first Christmas tree we saw, but we kept looking anyway to see if there was something even better.  We ended up coming back to this because it really was pretty perfect!

It looked huge in our living room!

This was the first year we did lights on the outside of our house.  Brian did such a great job with them!  I loved seeing them every night and the girls were thrilled with them.  I told him a while ago that I thought a star like this would look nice on our house, and I came home from a girls night one night to find he’d made it—I love this about him and I really love the star!

Ward Christmas party.  Santa fail again this year.  I actually thought Elna would sit on his lap because she talked about it all day and really wanted to tell him about the stroller she wanted.  I showed her about 15 pictures of happy children sitting on Santa’s lap before we went to the party, but when it came down to it, it was a no-go.  And Harriet wasn’t a huge fan either.

Gingerbread house.  Yeah, I totally bought the kit.  Next year I’d like to buy the molds and bake the pieces, but this year that wasn’t happening.

Santa was at Home Depot this year too, and Brian really thought they’d do it this time, but even as close as they got seemed a little too close for Hattie.

We made a birthday cake for Jesus.  This might have been my favorite activity this year that I did with the girls.  They loved it too!

A little chalkboard art--Oh Come Let Us Adore Him—a good reminder for our family this season.

We sang “happy birthday” to Jesus and blew out the candles, making wishes/promises of things we want to work on as gifts to Jesus next year.  New tradition!