Christmas Bucket List; Christmas movies

One of my favorite things to so with our kiddos is snuggle up and watch movies with them... especially after they are bathed, lotioned and jammied :)

So in preparation for Christmas, we watched a few movies over the course of the month; Mickey's Twice Upon A Christmas, Veggie Tales Saint Nicholas, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Curious George; Very Monkey Christmas.
I saved you all from pics from each one of those movie nights :), but here is one night where we snuggled up with hot chocolate and snuggly blankets:

:)

Decking the halls and decorating the tree

We 'decked the halls' a couple weeks ago and just finished up the tree last night. It was wonderful; Christmas music on, hot coco ready and kiddos hanging up their favorite ornaments ;)

When it was all said and done, our tree looked like this:

Every year, we choose a few new ornaments... one for our family that represents something special that we experienced during that year, and then the kiddos get to choose an ornament that they love. I'm sure from the pics below you can tell that they don't love candy ;)

Jake's candy cane ornament

Lauren's lollipop

Megan's first ornament ;)

Our new ornament this year... depicting our family of FIVE!

 And then some personal faves from years past:

My fave; etched glass

Justin's fave; the first ornament of real 'value' to him after we had a baby ;)

And, a few photos of our decorated home:

And now, 14 days 'til Christmas! Can you tell how excited I am??? ;)

Christmas Bucket list; Operation Christmas Child

We love this tradition... choosing gifts for children who need Christmas gifts. Plus, it's on our Christmas bucket list ;) And what better way to show God's love than by helping out His children in need? So just like last year, we headed over to the dollar store and let Jake and Lauren pick special gifts for these children. Lauren chose for a girl and Jake for a boy...

And when we were all though, we came home and wrapped them. Now they're off and hopefully will bring huge smiles to some children Christmas morning ;) 

Christmas Bucket List

With Halloween and Thanksgiving over, we can now officially dump our Fall list and focus on some Christmas activities!!

Oh goodness, I love this time of year! Love, love, love it! One of best (if not the best) parts of Christmas is doing activities together as a family. I love Christmas traditions with my family!

To help get everybody excited for family activities, I have created and printed out a Christmas Bucket List (although, for some reason blogger won't let me add it as an attachemtn so I took a picture of it). It was fun to think through and get excited for the Christmas stuff we'll be doing in the next few weeks. It also helped me put together our Christmas schedule so we can make sure we can do all the things we are excited about. I tried to keep the list (somewhat) limited so that we don’t feel overwhelmed like there are 1,000,000 things we need to do on top of the 1,000,000 things that are happening over the holidays.

Of course, there are other things we wanna do this year but they aren't crucial. Here are the things we'd like to do for sure though:

Make a Gingerbread House

Read stories of Jesus' birth
Make a 'Jesus Tree'

Kids singing at church

Deck the Halls

See Christmas lights

Watch a Christmas movie

Go to Mission Inn's 'Festival of Lights'

Drink hot coco

Make crafts with me(ongoing)

Do something nice for someone

Decorate the Christmas tree

Go caroling with small group

Shop for Operation Christmas Child gifts
Bake Christmas goodies
Make Jesus a Birthday Cake

We're super excited to celebrate this Holiday season!