Since we were home the weekend after Thanksgiving break we were able to decorate the whole house for Christmas. It was pretty fun to get out the decorations and see the excitement on the kids' faces as they put up their own ornaments. You might also notice in the picture that there are no ornaments on the bottom 1.5-2 feet of the tree. Well, that's because Emma is so good at taking them off and every time she would remove and/or break one, the kids would put it up higher and out of her reach. This means we have a very heavily decorated tree at about 3-4 feet and hardly anything above or below there!
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| Lillian in front of Christmas Tree |
We invited some friends over to decorate Gingerbread houses with us one day which was a huge mess and a lot of chaos with 11 kids 5 and under, and Jocelyn at 7 to bring up the average age :) but they had a lot of fun.
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| All kids with their gingerbread houses |
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| Decorating chaos |
We delivered all our family gifts of mistletoe and potpourri and also hosted a Hot Chocolate Party & Appetizers at our house to give us a chance to visit with some of our friends in between holidays. We plan to host another one this Sunday with another (different) group of friends because just that one week we had about 30 kids. We figured we'd try to somewhat limit the damage on the house:) Of course I failed to take pictures, but it was a success and everything tasted good and it seemed everyone had a good time visiting.
To try to get the kids into the real purpose of Christmas we've been doing our advent calendar with Christ-centered books, etc. every day (or at least most days and then play catch up on nights when we have more time). We also participated in an "adopt a family" community program where we shopped for a little boy around Lillian's age and bought him Christmas and then also made some fleece scarves for delivery through our church to the local homeless shelter. One day when then girls were having a huge "girl" playdate I got the scarves all cut out and ready. Then they and their friends tied knots in the edges to finish them.
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| The girls (missing one in the other room) tying the scarves |
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| Jocelyn and neighbor tying scarves |
That doesn't mean that they aren't "asking" for certain things from Santa. Jonas has been talking about getting a big buzz lightyear for months and I happen to have an "in" with Santa who tells me he is getting one. Which also means that the days for these two little pals that Jonas has been playing with will soon come to an end. In fact, one day when I asked Jonas "What if Santa brings you a big Buzz, what will you do with your little Buzz?" he responded "I'll just leave out Buzz with cookies and give Santa the little Buzz and he can leave me the big Buzz." He has it all worked out :)
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| Jonas with little Buzz and Woody |
Our generous neighbor gave us Gilroy Gardens tickets two more times this month. We ended up sharing tickets with two different families for November (since we just went in October and were busy doing house projects amongst other things) and then another family and ourselves to go see the "Holiday Lights." It was freezing and since we are getting over being cold and, let's be honest, wimpy Californians we didn't last for very long but it was still fun to see what all the hype was about.
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| Cait and older girls holiday lights |
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| Whole fam. bundled up at holiday lights |
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| Jared and Emma holiday lights |
As usual, the very first Family Home Evening in December the kids demanded that we take out the Nativity costumes and dress up and act out the Nativity story for the FHE lesson. We were in the midst of that when our neighbor came over to pick up our old Christmas tree that we had offered them. He was a little embarrassed (probably for us) when he saw we were all dressed up, but we told him it was perfect timing and he could take a picture for us and join us since we were short one wiseman! He humored us with the picture, but for some reason didn't take us up on dressing up... I can't imagine why??
We are so excited to be able to see some of our family over Christmas!! We wish we could be with all of our family, but we'll take what we can get. I think some are even coming to our house to spend a night or two so that should be fun. We are so grateful for this time of year and all the sights, smells, traditions, people and above all the opportunity to remember Christ.
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