It's Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas

I am really perplexed by how quickly this Christmas season is going.  Perplexed, irritated, bewildered, frustrated, annoyed, confused.  I love to savor Christmas and it's flying by me.  I don't know what the difference is this year, but in the midst of all of the fun, I have this mental countdown to Christmas and it's coming far too fast!

I know a lot of it is being busy.  It is a busy time of year anyway and we started our Advent coming off of a particularly busy Thanksgiving with bonus visits by Uncle Jonathan and Grandpa and Nana Nolen.  It's all been fun, but still, busy.

We decorated the Christmas tree not on the Friday after Thanksgiving this year, but the Sunday... the first Sunday in Advent, actually.  Scott and Coral had left, but Jonathan was still around.  He didn't participate in the decking of the halls because he was starting to feel sick, but after a few antibiotics that day, he was all better the next.

We did two trees again this year... the Advent tree in gold and white and our family tree in red with penguins and all of our special ornaments.

The Advent tree went up first.  Sydney and John were both able to hang the gold ball ornaments.

I enjoyed getting out the Chrismons from last year and explaining some of the symbolism behind each of them.

Sydney put the Angel on the Advent tree.

Jeremy got the trees out and was prepping the red tree while we did the Advent tree.

It's a sad little four foot fake tree, but it looks so much better with more ornaments on it.

Sydney was aware, possibly for the first time, that she had special ornaments... ones with her picture or her name on them, or ones that she had made or ones that had been bought for her.  She carefully hung them all up... in the exact same spot on the tree.

 

After the decorating, the kids, in their new Christmas pajamas, sat down in front of the fireplace with hot coco and Jeremy read the Christmas story from Luke.

I love that part of the start of Advent at our house best of all.

It is a busy time of year and we do have lots of fun traditions.  I guess the key is making sure all that fun doesn't overwhelm the peace and joy of the season of our Lord's birth.