Holiday Essentials

Christmas is overwhelming for me. For everyone… I believe…. right? Or am I the only one?

There are gifts to buy or make, and timelines to get things to the post office, cutting down the Christmas tree, decorating the tree, wrapping the gifts, filling the advent calendar, watching a million Christmas movies, reading a million Christmas books, writing letters to Santa, setting up the Nativity, baking/decorating cookies, viewing neighborhood Christmas Lights, the gingerbread house, making gifts for neighbors, taking a family photo and sending out Christmas cards, baking, baking, and baking, visiting Santa, Christmas parties, teacher gifts before school gets out, oh, and making more gifts.

And this all must get done this month! within only a few weeks actually. and….. ready…… GO……..

Some years I feel on top of things, others not so much. This is a ‘Not-so-much’ year. We are just sticking to the essentials.

Our tree is up and glowing. You would never know from this picture that 2 rows of lights are out. My Dad was here for Thanksgiving and helped us pick this guy out. Our living room is smaller than earlier years so we wanted to get a smaller tree. We ended up getting our biggest tree yet!

The kids wrote their letters to Santa. I think Jefferson has better handwriting than I do.

Santa won’t have any problem fulfilling Reagan’s wishes. Don’t even question the artwork…. I have no idea.

We set up our Nativities. Thank goodness we have 3 sets! Everyone has their own particular idea of how it should be set up.

They did a pretty good job, although Grant might need a little reminder of the Nativity Story.

And we made our Gingerbread (graham cracker) house.

Good thing Shawn was there to scientifically size a cut the crackers to fit the box perfectly.

Honey, your skills are unmatched! Here it is ready to decorate.

And they’re off………

Jefferson was a wild icer. He did a great job. His creative touch was adding a dollop of animal poop behind every animal cracker. nice.

Reagan just like squirting icing everywhere

This was Grant’s contribution….

This is what we were aiming for….

And this is what ours looks like. Better if you ask me. I mean, look at those curtains in the windows… they’re so realistic looking. And ours has a pond filled with huge Swedish Fish in it.

And 2 days later, our Gingerbread house looks like this…. even the animal poop is gone! My kids have no self-control.

Hopefully I’ve redeemed myself from not carving a pumpkin this year.

There’s still a lot more to do (like get Shawn a gift… boy is he hard to shop for) but we certainly won’t be able to do it all this year.  What we have done has been fun, and everyone around here is getting more and more excited for the big day.