Christmas-time favorites

Here are some of the things I love to do most at Christmas:

Parties-  Here we are at Ryan's preschool party.  I love Christmas parties at church, school, home, they are all great.  The more white elephant gift exchanges, the better.

Christmas goodies:  I let the kids decorate our sugar cookies this year.  We've also made peanut butter balls, wassil, cheeseball, almond crescents, fudge, and candy cane cookies.  I look forward to eating Dixie's kringla's and my mom's pecan logs soon!

I love decorating the tree every year.  As soon as I am finished eating Thanksgiving dinner, I am ready to bust out the tree.  Both Spencer and I received an ornament every year growing up so it's fun to look at our old ornaments and build up the boys collection.  Again, I let the boys help me with the task.  I even tried to not rearrange the ornaments too much after they were done.

Christmas books:  We have a LOT of Christmas books and I still buy too many every year.  We do the 12 days of Christmas in books with the kids.  They get to open a book every day and we read it together.  Ryan has got used to me crying through my favorites like The Christmas Oranges or A Christmas Dress for Ellen.  

And the thing that almost always gets me in the most Christmasy mood is singing Christmas songs, I especially look forward to the Sacrament Meeting before Christmas.  Here are the cute kiddos ready to go to church today.  It was wonderful and I loved all of the musical numbers.  I participated in one and asked Andrew if he liked it, but he said "I didn't like it, the singing was too loud".  Thanks Andrew!