"MOM, IT'S CHRISTMAS!"

Everyone in our family loves Christmas. I love the lights and smells and especially the warm spirit of the season. I love to see what cute things the kids are making at school and absolutely melt when I can open the gifts they worked so hard to make. Chris loves Christmas Eve, when he can make his famous prime rib for dinner and read 'The Night Before Christmas' to the kids. Olivia loves buying and wrapping presents for everyone she can think of. (This year she was done weeks ahead of the rest of us. Her gifts have been wrapped and under the tree in her bedroom forever!) She also likes making and decorating sugar cookies for Santa. Nick likes all the sweet Christmas sweets, his favorite is probably the chocolate advent calendar that he dives into every morning immediately after breakfast. He also likes our Christmas tradition of unwrapping a Christmas book each night in December and reading it together. He keeps our "Countdown to Christmas" blocks updated with the correct number of nights until Santa comes and also tears a paper ring off the chain he made in school every morning be for he leaves for the day. This kid is all about knowing when the man in red will be here! Ben discovered Christmas this year for really the first time. Every Christmas tree or reindeer he spots he hollers," Mom! It's Christmas!" and then belts out the first verse of Jingle Bells as loud as he can. Thankfully he has a cute little voice and so far, the people in Michaels Crafts, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Target and the grocery store have enjoyed his holiday spirit.

We all enjoy decorating the Christmas tree so we waited and did it the Friday after Thanksgiving weekend. It is an artificial tree, pre-lit with white lights. ( I won the white or colored light battle.) Our tree has a theme....no theme at all. It has be be totally kid friendly in every way. I figure there will be many years that I can have a beautifully designed tree with hand blown glass angels, right now it is for the little ones. Sometimes we hang cookies or make some new little ornaments for it, but it always has to have jingle bells, ribbon and candy canes. The kids are given a new ornament each year and they love to get them out and hang them on the tree. This year it was a bit of an ordeal that Olivia has the most ornaments...no one quite understood that since she is the oldest, she should have the most ornaments. Also given to the oldest child is the privledge of putting the star on the top of the tree. (Nick was given charge of the Christmas Countdown blocks.) The Livster is a little afraid of heights right now so when her dad put her on his shoulders and then started tickling her, she about blew a laughing gasket. It was pretty funny. She did manage to get the star perfectly placed on the top. I remember as a kid sitting in the family room after decorating the tree with only the lights of the Christmas tree on- I loved it back then and still love it today! We read a few Christmas stories and then it was off to bed.<

This little stinker would not get out of the way so I could take a picture...look at that sassy face!

So the tree is up but I have my doubts about how long it will last. Within the first 24 hours of having it out, Ben broke 3 ornaments, we lost a good portion of the bells due to living room wrestling, and a lamp fell into the side of it. I'm still not too sure how that happened. I found nearly all of the candy canes in Ben's bed under his pillow a few nights back and have had to speak daily with Nick about not violently shaking the tree in order to get the bells to sound. The boys love to lay under the tree in the mornings with their blankets and I quietly stand nearby, watching the tree teeter and totter back and forth above them. Gotta love it.
This year the kids wanted trees in their bedroom too. They turned out darling and seem to be holding up a lot better than even the big tree! The boys wanted me to suprise them and decorate their tree so I used all of their wooden trains and made a cute little train tree for their room. They loved it! Liv wanted a white retro sort of tree with colored lights to match her room so hers is done in green pink and turquoise. It is really cute, too. They fall asleep each night staring at their trees.


Even Charlie got decorated for Christmas. He is wishing for an electric fence from Santa.....