Third Week of Advent

It's the rush before Christmas and for the first time this December I'm feeling it a little bit.  We do some sort of gift for an incredible number of people.  If you count edible gifts, the number is just shy of 100!  I absolutely love doing it.  I love thinking about each person as I am buying and making and wrapping.  I don't ever want to stop.  But I'm thinking that we might do a Christmas in July this year and use that month to do all of our gift preparations.  In light of that, I'm amazed at how relatively unstressful this month has been. Yoga continues to be a huge help.  Our Advent ritual and Ann Voskamp's devotional have been helpful as well in maintaining focus.

Nora and I spent the better part of Friday making fudge treats for pretty much everyone at church.  Well, not really, but everyone who has anything to do with the music department.  And neighbors.  We have about 60 of these little suckers to give away:

Brown paper packages tied up with string...

We finally got a tree!

We learned a few tips this year.  I'll share them with you.

Apparently when you go 5 days before Christmas there are only 5 trees left in the lot and they are half off.  Score!  But...you should probably check early in the month to make sure you have lights and not wait until your kids are all excited to decorate the tree and you have to make an emergency trip to the store.  When you wait until 5 days before Christmas to get your lights, you will go to three stores during this emergency excursion in search of the real white lights that you knew and loved as a child.  They are endangered.  You will not find them.  After walking up and down the aisle of the third store for 15 minutes, staring at the sparse shelves and hoping to see the white lights magically materialize, you will settle on an enormous roll of large LED lights, since, what the heck - "go big or go home".   And they'll be on sale so at least you'll think there is something redeeming about them.  You will ask your husband to put them on the tree so that you can start cleaning up the fudge explosion in the kitchen.  When you emerge, you will stare with horror at your radioactive tree.  After an hour of trying to tell yourself it's not that big of a deal, you will undo all of your husband's good work.  You will have a naked tree until Christmas Eve when, hopefully, your Amazon order of real white lights will arrive.

Earlier in December I actually toyed with the idea of decorating on Christmas Eve since I know some people do that.  So that's what we'll do this year by accident.  Who knows, maybe it will become a tradition.

I intended to have the girls do a page a day of this Christmas Alphabet I had printed out.  We did three pages.  Oh well.  It was a nice thought.  We'll try again next year.  I was working with Nora on making each element of her pictures look different.  Even just doing these few pages has seemed to help her.  I love seeing her hear a new idea - like "Hey, how 'bout you don't make the entire page purple.  How can you make Mary and Joseph and the donkey look different?" - and then work with that concept on her own.  Whenever I have seen her coloring on her own now she uses several different colors and stays within the lines of each page element much more. She never did that before.  I forget sometimes how she needs just a bit of instruction with concepts that I wouldn't necessarily think to teach.  And then she needs me to leave her alone to work on it. Claire did the one on the right entirely without help.  She has no problem seeing the different elements in the picture and decorating accordingly.  It's amazing how differently kids' minds work.

The girls have so enjoyed having a lot of time to play together and help me with Christmas preparations.  Since I've tried to keep things so low-key we have been home more than usual and we don't have a loaded schedule.  It is so so nice.  I think I'm going to try my hardest to keep it that way.  They learn so much just from being together and having the gift of time.

On Saturday we celebrated Christmas with my Dad's side of the family.  We had a wonderful time with everyone.  I love seeing how all of the cousins enjoy each other.  Here they are wearing the special shirts that Mimi made for them...

Here is a video of Lucy dancing to Sting.  I think Nora and Claire are pretending to be on a car ride in the corner there...

Here is a glimpse of the end of our Advent ritual.  They love to blow out the candles out on the wreath which, by the end of December, looks like a birthday cake.

The wait is almost over...