Better late than never! Here's my attempt to recap all of our Christmas celebrations....
Our Christmas card! I loved it this year, thanks to a super talented
photographer and a super talented
designer.
Both are local by the way!
Santa Clause came to our town. Morgan wasn't a huge fan, but took her thumb out of her mouth long enough for a picture! Mallory told Santa she wanted a "Barbie kingdom and a Barbie doll". Apparently she heard one of her friends from school ask for that, so she thought it was a good idea!
We made the obligatory Christmas cookies. Mallory used her egg-cracking skills she learned from BMom to help out.
A little blonde two year old was EATING the flour I spread out to roll the cookie dough on, so she got booted from the kitchen pretty fast. She literally would run her hand over the flour and lick it. Turkey!
The 12 cookies (out of 36) that were decorate-able. My name is not Betty Crocker:)
We got excited about
very small snow flurries before we headed out to church!
I would love to talk about Mallory hearing her first curse word at our Christmas Eve service, but that is another post. Mallory really enjoyed sitting in "big church" and singing lots of songs she's been learning all month.
After church, we had dinner with some good friends. The kids celebrated Jesus's birth with cupcakes! It was sweet to watch them all sing Happy Birthday, and remember the whole reason why we celebrate Christmas.
I was probably more excited than the girls when we got home. I NEVER got to open a present on Christmas Eve and it drove me nuts! We started a new tradition of giving jammies on Christmas Eve to the girls. Mallory was so excited they had feet in them!!
Another tradition I remmeber my dad doing (and wondering how he got a picture of everything Santa left!), is taking a picture of the tree/presents before Christmas morning.
This was the first year to wake up at our own home on Christmas morning. We missed out on lots of snow at both sets of grandparents, but we wouldn't change the excitement of the morning with our girls.
The girls could have just opened their stockings and been satisfied! Brad made a yummy breakfast for us and then we opened gifts.
Brad and I still go back and forth on Santa and how far we want to play it up. In fact, we totally forgot to tell Mallory that Santa brought her the Barbie doll she had asked for! Will she be scarred for life? Yikes.
Another thing we did this year is give the girls three presents each. Jesus got three gifts (right Mom??!!), so it seems like a great way to teach them the real meaning.
By far, the favorite activity of the month was our Advent calendar (thank you TBC missions garage sale!). The girls loved hearing the story over and over about Jesus. We sang different carols and read some books, too. Next year I want to add in things we can do as a family and verses to read each night.
Missing: video of Mallory telling the Christmas story...because Blogger is taking forever!!!! Maybe next time.
