Surprise for Chris!

After lots of planning and secrets and help from David, my brother-in-law, I was able to surprise Chris on Christmas morning with a basketball hoop in front of our house!!! We drove up after spending the night at my aunts house, ready to switch our Christmas gifts and grab good to take to his parents house and we pulled up to see the hoop up with a big red bow!!!! The surprise was flawless thanks to Dave and Andrew, Chris' brothers. SO exciting to pull it off!

Christmas Eve & Day!

As has become tradition, we spent Christmas Eve at my aunt's river house and slept over with my side of the family. Then we drove back Christmas morning to celebrate with Chris' side of the family. It works out really well. This year we added a Christmas Eve brunch at Cracker Barrel with my family and I hope that becomes a tradition too!

Bark Family Night!

We've been trying to keep Thursday night sacred for family nights for a couple years now. We've also been trying to build relationships with our neighbors and love on them. So, we combined those two for a Christmas-serve-our-neighbors themed family night a couple weeks before Christmas!

We tried our hand at making bark for the first time. Melting chocolate and adding anything to it proved to be the perfect family cooking experiment! We made white chocolate and milk chocolate with pretzels, MnMs, crushed Oreos, and some chocolate Christmas colored candies. We made a TON and packaged most of it up for 6 of our neighbors. It was a quick project so we decided to go deliver it with our Christmas cards that same night...not realizing it was pouring rain!! But, not wanting to ruin our momentum, we braved it which made for an even more memorable adventure :-)

'tis the season

Did I mention we love Christmas? We had friends over to make candy Christmas trees (twice), went to the Symphony of Lights near our house, visited the festival of trees, hosted a neighborhood cookies and cocoa party, made a paper chain to count down each day til Christmas, read the Jesus Storybook Bible to lead up to Jesus' birth and overall, enjoyed the season!

Christmas Tree Farm!

We cut down our own Christmas Tree for THE FIRST TIME EVER!!! We love all things Christmas so much we decided to try our hand at cutting down our own tree. We found the farm close by and spent hours looking for the right tree. I think going a little late in the season did us a disservice because it was hard to find the perfect tree. However, we ended up getting a white pine with long needles (we've never had that type before) and it worked out great! The tree was cheap ($40) and the actual cutting took about 5 minutes. The best part? Our tree was still soft to touch in FEBRUARY when we finally took it down! Usually our trees are dead and prickly within 2 weeks! Definitely will be making this a tradition!