This week has really gotten me into the Christmas spirit. We started out the weekend by cutting down our Christmas tree. This year we went to a small farm, with not a lot of choice and rather wild trees but I did like it better than the tree farm we chose last year. That one was a bit too much like a tree factory. It was windy and very cold, so the fact that we only had to walk into a field right next to where we parked was great!
After we got home, we decorated the tree. It isn’t a big tree so it didn’t take us very long to get it up and decorated. Widget was very excited to participate in the tree decorating, we have a few clusters of ornaments at about the 3 foot height, where she helped. I have caught her a couple of times moving ornaments around, whereupon she tells me that this ornament was crooked and needed to be fixed
We had our small group Christmas party on Sunday afternoon. It was a Christmas Sweater Party. Everyone looked fabulous. I don’t have a copy of the group picture yet, but I will be sure to share it when I do. We also got to meet the newest member of our small group as one of the couples just got back from picking up their son in Ethiopia on Friday night. He is darling and has the biggest chocolate brown eyes! It was a lot of fun.
Monday was Widget’s preschool Christmas program. I will admit that this mama got little teary-eyed watching her little girl stand up and sing. How can it be that she is old enough to be in a Christmas program? It amazes me every time I look at her, to think that she was once this tiny babe in arms and now she is four. I have a little video but I’m using T’s laptop at the moment, so I will add it later
After the program, Widget went home with T’s mom and T and I braved the weather and got most of our Christmas shopping for Widget. T does have a project to build a playstand ahead of him but it is a fairly easy one (so he says!). Afterwards, we had a nice dinner together before we headed to T’s parents’ to pick up Widget.
Yesterday we went to my sister’s house and made cookies. Lots of cookies. And we didn’t even get through making all the kinds of cookies we had planned. We managed to make our two favorites, chocolate cookies with chocolate frosting (I posted the recipe way back in 2006!) and my paternal grandmother’s sugar cookie recipe MK has a some good pictures on her blog if you want to see the plethora of cookies we made. Widget, A and W had a great time cutting out the cookies, well, W had a great time eating the dough but the other two sat for a couple of hours helping us.
Fortunately, the rest of the week isn’t quite so busy! I love this time of the year. It can be a little stressful and overwhelming, especially as we continue to find our way to a new semblance of family since my parents’ divorce, but it always makes me stop and think about the blessings my family has been given and the joy of remembering Christ’s birth.










