It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas...

I was so excited to get ready for Christmas this year. For the first time in my life I was itching for Thanksgiving to pass so we could decorate the tree and listen to Christmas music. If you don't know, that is really strange for me. I am very picky about Christmas music (I don't think every musician needs to put out their own cheesy album) and I can't stand it when stores start decorating and playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving. The town decorated their main street and practically all of the light posts in town right after Halloween. At first it bugged me but it looked so pretty that that didn't last long. I think that was what inspired me to get into the Christmas spirit a bit earlier than I normally would. And the fact that it is freezing and all of the trees are completely bare which just makes me think of winter and Christmas.

So just a few days after Thanksgiving our tree was up and decorated. We bought our first (semi) full sized, pre-lit tree. It is the perfect size for the number of ornaments we have.

We put it on a box so that Adele can't reach all of the ornaments and then put the non breakable ones on the bottom because no matter how often we tell her not to touch we often find her touching away! The morning after we put it up she found 3 loud jingle bells and she carried them all over the house jingling all the way. She is always fascinated with what she'll find. Liam and Jonas (our official ornament hangers) had a blast looking at each ornament and hearing about whose they were and where they came from.

Nate and I wanted to do an advent calendar this year. We found some online that you could buy but I really wanted to make something. So we came up with this little plan. We bought a pack of Lego Mini figs as the fillers and I made my own little boxes to put them in using scrapbook paper I had on hand. Then we just piled the boxes on the mantle. At some point I am going to add in little notes of things we can do on a few of the days like watch a Christmas movie, or hang mistletoe, deliver treats to friends, Christmas FHE, drive around looking at Christmas lights, stuff like that. Here is what they look like:


Liam and Jonas are both part of a Christmas program the Primary are putting on for the church Christmas party. They are going to be shepherds. The leaders asked us if they had bath robes and since Liam and Jonas don't I came up with these costumes by cutting up a $3 bed skirt we found at a local store and some Walmart clearance fabric. They were excited to try on the costumes and jump around.


Our Elf on the Shelf Johnny returned this year on December 1st. Liam and Jonas were SO EXCITED to see him! They talk to him through out the day and make comments about needing to behave so Johnny will give Santa a good report about them. Here he is hanging from the strings of the blinds. Silly guy! I hear other elves are much sillier and get into much more mischief than our Johnny. We'll see if he gets more wacky as it gets closer to Christmas.


I printed out this cute Christmas themed subway art and happened to have a frame on hand that matched it. I used scrapbook paper to make it look like it was matted.


I have been having so much fun doing little Christmas crafts and making our house look a little more festive!