Christmas

We had a really good Christmas this year. We started it as usual with our tradition of setting up and decorating the Christmas tree after Thanksgiving and doing our normal family picture in front of the tree.

I couldn't resist including this one, Jenny, looking so excited in front of the tree.

We also had fun with cousins sledding.

And having snowball fights.

Also, this year, Terry and Anah invited us over for making Christmas cookies so we enjoyed doing that with them. Jenny, my cooking cutting fiend, especially loved it.

I'll give you one guess on who put the sprinkles on the above cookie.

We also did our normal decorating gingerbread houses tradition as a family.

Our last year's winner was dethroned this year ...

...by this beauty:

And pictured with it's proud owner and yes, that is a tumbleweed Christmas tree table center piece.

Fun was had by all and much candy sneaking!

We did our usual pictures with Santa at Adobe.

Tessa did great!

And this year, Jenny actually let herself be pictured alone instead of just being held by mom. Though I think you can tell from her body language, she definitely trusts Mrs. Claus more than the big guy, himself.

This year, for cookies for Santa, Jenny specifically asked if we could do homemade gingerbread cookies and she asked near the beginning of December. So we made sure to make it happen at Grandma's house where we did Christmas (thanks, mom!). By gingerbread cookies she meant sugar cookies that she could cut out into gingerbread men shapes. She really loves using the cookie cutters and she had fun decorating them too.

She wanted to make one for Santa, one for Mrs. Claus and one for their baby. Thus the three cookies in the three sizes.

Then this year David and I introduced a new Christmas/winter time tradition - snowshoeing. We snowshoed around Tibble Fork Reservoir twice now and it is really beautiful there.

I've liked hiking for a long time and I've really missed it in years passed during the winter so it has been really fun to start snowshoeing. It has really helped with making the winter feel less long and awful to be able to still get outside and enjoy nature. Yay for snowshoeing!

We also started a new tradition as a family - watching a Christmas movie. This year, mom picked it and I choose the Mickey's Christmas Carol, an old classic I liked as a kid so that was fun. I didn't get any photos of it so I'll just include this fun Christmasy picture from the office at Jenny and Tessa's school in it's stead.

Merry Christmas, y'all!