It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

I am SO SO SO behind on blogging that I am struggling to find the motivation to keep up. Part of me just wants to write about the more recent stuff, but because I want to put all of 2014’s blog posts into a book for our family I don’t feel like I can leave out major events. So I feel like I need to try to catch up a little bit, even though I think I’d rather just write about stuff going on now. In any case, here we are in the middle of February and I’m writing about December happenings. Yeehaw.

We were able to squeeze several fun christmas-y things into our month. We were all so excited for Kellen’s first Christmas. He loved mostly everything (except for Santa, but we’ll get to that), especially the lights. In fact, the first time he actually genuinely crawled a significant distance on his hands and knees was when we put up the lights on our Christmas tree. He took one look at the glowing tree, pushed himself up, and crawled towards it as fast as he could! He hasn’t left it alone since. Our tree is only decorated from about a foot from the bottom up. 

We have this tradition where we put up our Christmas decorations on Thanksgiving day. The sooner the better we say, and the longer we have to enjoy them. The boys were so excited to “help.”

On of our favorite Christmas decorations is this little Fisher-Price nativity set. We usually get it out the first Monday of the month and do a little FHE where we tell the boys about the birth of the Savior. I was really impressed with how much of the story Mason remembered this year. He could repeat a good portion of it and could identify all of the characters. He called the gifts the wise men brought “Frankensince, Gold, and Mermaid.” Haha. Kellen mostly loved gnawing on shepherds and sheep.
One day I found the nativity like this:

We wore Christmas nammies as much as possible.

We made Christmas cookies.

We read lots of Christmas stories. One of our traditions is to go to the bookstore to read Christmas stories and pick out a new Christmas book each year. We are slowly building our holiday library. This years book was “Snowman at Christmas.” Such a cute book! The illustrations are darling and Mason loves look and find books.

We took the boys to the cemetery to see the reindeer. I’m not sure why the reindeer live at the cemetery, but they do. Their caretaker told us to bring them bananas the next time we visited. Apparently reindeer love bananas. Who knew?

Then we went to meet Santa.

Even though Kellen was decidedly unimpressed, this was the best Santa I’ve ever seen. He was so patient and kind with the boys and took lots of time to talk to them. Mason ran right up and told him that he wants a “screw” for Christmas. He meant a little toy power drill. He got one for his birthday, but that one broke and he has been asking for another one. We told him that maybe he’d get one for Christmas and Mason hasn’t forgotten it. He talks about Santa bringing him a screw all the time.

The setup to visit Santa was really nice too. Santa had his own little gingerbread house and families got to enter one at at time. It made the experience a lot more personal and less rushed to be away from the loud line outside the door.

We made several family outings to go look at the lights. There are a few local spots that are actually really pretty. We also went to a local tree lighting ceremony and that was really fun. It was exciting to be with the crowd and count down from ten to light the enormous tree. The boys met Santa there too, but I didn’t get a good picture of that one.

The end.

Or rather, to be continued…