This Christmas has been pretty different than years past. It hasn't felt like Christmas to me. Maybe that's because it was 65 degrees until last week or because we've started to do our own things and create our own traditions. Regardless, it has been a really great month of fun memories as a family. Not too different from every other of the last 10 months :)
Our little house doesn't have a great spot for a Christmas tree, and we didn't want to be playing defense against Crawford for a whole month so we improvised. We got this tiny little tree to set on the dresser in the entry way. It is perfect. Crawford LOVES it. Just this week he's started saying tree. Well, sort of. When he sees a tree (a Christmas tree), he enthusiastically says "BEEEE". And, now he associates anything with lights on it as a Christmas tree/tree/bee and says bee all the time.
Instead of picking some of our ornaments to put on it, this just became our Jesse Tree. Melissa gave me the idea, and I made 5 sets of Jesse Tree ornaments (one for us, my sister, David's sister, David's parents and my parents). But, I quit after making 14 of them (times 5!) because I was out of creative juice. Everyone will get the rest of their set next year. Regardless, it was a really special way to keep the focus on Jesus this year.
We took Crawford to see Santa. I'm torn on this one. We want to "do" Santa at our house, but not take away from Jesus at Christmas time (or any time of the year). We want the emphasis to always be on Jesus being born, but to also enjoy the fun and silly traditions we enjoyed growing up. We still have some deciding to do on how we are going to balance the two, but for this year we thought it would be fun to see what the little guy would do when he saw the big guy in red.
The Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors had a Santa come to their office one day, so it was a free thing for all local realtors to do with their families. It was the perfect way for us to do this! They had a photographer, and we got all the pictures for free. I shouldn't have been surprised because Crawford has never met a stranger (except Uncle Jayme... he is scared of him), but he warmed right up to Santa. It probably didn't hurt that Santa gave him a candy cane (?!).
Hannah asked if I had any Christmas-y crafts that I'd like to share. Ha. I wish. We hardly decorated our house this year, which was sad, but nice and easy. I did to the Jesse Tree ornaments above, and I made Crawford a little festive outfit that turned out pretty nicely. The plaid was an old flannel pillow case of my brother's that I turned into some simple pants and a "C" appliqué on a tshirt. Easy peasy. I used the outside hem of the pillow case for the bottom of the pants, so I only had to sew like four lines to stitch them together (I used this baby pant pattern and tutorial. It's for newborns, so I just used a pair of C's pants to eyeball how much bigger they should be.).
We had a fun Christmas party with our playgroup friends, but since the Linhosses were home sick, Crawford was the lone boy in attendance. It happens a lot in our circle of friends, and I don't think he minds too much :).
Still to come... our actual Christmas celebrations!
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