'Tis the Season...

Merry Christmas to you! We have been in the "mood" for Christmas for awhile now. Here are some pictures of some of what we've been up to the last couple of weeks. My brother came over a couple of weeks ago and took some pictures for our Christmas card. Here's one that we actually didn't use, but it's a fun one anyway. This is when we had snow and looked like Christmas (now it looks and feels like April).

We really enjoyed our Thanksgiving break. I made this pile of crepes one morning. By the end of the meal, they were all gone! I don't make them very often.

Last Sundy on the first Sunday of Advent, we lit our candles in the Advent Wreath, read some things about what Advent is all about and sang "O Come Emmanuel". I have to laugh every time I see our little wreath. I ordered it online and thought it would be about the size of a dinner plate, but it's not. It's about 4 inches across. The kids were happy anyway. As long as there's fire, they're fascinated! The replacement candles I ordered with it are about 12 inches high, so we shouldn't run out of candle power before Christmas :)

Sugar cookies!

Last night we went out and cut our Christmas tree. The "honor" is now Ned's.

It's so muddy and icky out now, so instead of being covered in snow, the kids were covered in mud when we got home. Oh well. We were looking for a skinny tree to fit in our living room and found the perfect one!

As we were bringing the tree inside, this is how God painted the sunset. The sunrises and sunsets have been incredible the past few days.

So... trees always look so much smaller outside! Leo had to stand on a chair and put Rylea on his shoulders to put the angel on top of the tree :) Most all of our Christmas decorations are from Kenya. It's a fun reminder of our time in Africa and makes us look forward to more Christmas's there. Maybe we'll have to stock up on Alaskan decorations to take with us for next year :)

After we got the tree decorated, Leo and the children made his famous Peanut Butter Popcorn Log (it used to be popcorn balls, but we found that dumping a big "log" of popcorn down the middle of the table and drizzling the topping over it, works really well, especially for big crowds! I just realized we didn't get any pictures of the tree all decorated and put in place. Next post! Hope you are enjoying the season and are able to relax and enjoy all that God has done for you this year!