It's Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas!

Just a few pictures/anecdotes from the start of the Christmas season!

Derek's Dad & Eileen gave us this train for Shelby's first Christmas (if I remember correctly), and it's been one of my favorite Christmas traditions. We keep it around our "card tree" & it's a special Daddy/Shelby activity before bed each night.

Helping decorate the tree

Shelby showing off her placement of the candy canes ;)

Shelby checking out all the gifts under the tree

In addition to starting our Kindness Elf tradition this year, we also started another new tradition that I saw on Pinterest {HERE}. Essentially, the idea is to wrap 24 (although we did 25) Christmas books (they can be books you already have!!) & the kids get to open one each night before bed. Since my girls and I both have a love for children's books, this has been so fun for us! I labeled each book with the date they are supposed to open it on, and I tried to coordinate the books to our activities when applicable. For instance, Twas the Night Before Christmas will be opened on Christmas Eve every year & they'll be opening a gingerbread man story on the 13th b/c Shelby has a gingerbread party at her school that day. I also ordered a new book called Happy Birthday Jesus for their final book to unwrap on Christmas night. We have a good mix of new/old books and Santa/the meaning of Christmas books. Also, we started the month with having the girls open their new Elf on the Shelf  book to introduce the Kindess Elf tradition. I think we'll have them open that book on the 1st every year to reintroduce our elf Fisbee.

This picture is a perfect representation of our life right now.
There is nothing else to say about Hadley except that she is a hot mess.

Each night after we open & read the book, we leave it under the Christmas tree with the rest of the books.
One of Shelby's favorite things to do during the day is go sit by the tree & read all of the already opened books.

Another one of our favorite Christmasy activities so far this season is to load the girls up in their wagon after dinner and go look at the Christmas lights in our neighborhood. We've probably done this at least 5 nights already, we all love it!