Flight Suits and Fairytales: Christmas 2012

Christmas was awesome this year...seriously, the best one yet! We decorated for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving, and this year I was pumped b/c Chris got us a new tree! I'm a HUGE nerd, and super allergic to real trees, so ours was fake...but FABULOUS! It was pre-lit, had a button that you push to turn the lights on, was the perfect height, and it looked awesome in our front window. But, I digress...enough about the tree!

Christmas was so great this year because we started (and continued) some of our very own traditions. Not the ones that we necessarily had when we were kids, but special ones just for our family. We have a snowman advent calendar that we bought in Germany a few years ago that we talked about every night (we even made up a song, but my hubs would KILL me if I told you about it!). I got out all of the Christmas books that my mom has collected for me over the years and those were the ones that we read to Elli at bedtime. We got dressed up and went to the Christmas Eve service at a church we had never been to before. We woke up on Christmas morning and sipped hot chocolate while we opened our stockings, ate some yummy monkey bread, and then opened presents around the tree while listening to carols. It was like a dream for me, just the way I imagined it would be for my children. And I remember just looking at both of them in awe, praying that they treasure these times when we're all together because I know that Chris's job makes holidays as a family a little bit uncertain. We let the kids play with their toys all day, and then I made a birthday steak dinner for Chris that evening. We don't do the traditional turkey at Christmas yet...I'm still a little bit intimidated!

We have a HUGE family. The kids have four sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-grandparents, and then us...it makes for quite a lot of presents! Now I'm not anti-present or anything, but I want to make sure that in the midst of all the holiday hoopla, the kids understand the REAL reason that we're celebrating. This year we (Chris and I) decided to do 3 "Santa" gifts to represent the 3 wisemen's gifts to Christ. We then did 4 smaller presents sticking the the theme of: Want It, Wear It, Need It, Read It. Micah was so young that we didn't really do it for him, but Elli got a microphone, a dress, some big-girl panties, and 3 books. She was thrilled, and it's definitely a tradition that we'll continue!

Here's some pics from our holiday season...