Goodbye Thanksgiving (but we're still thankful). Hello Christmas!

That's what Travis told the kids as we took down the pumpkins and started

getting ready for Christmas...

Ellie's party was over around 1:30 on the Saturday after Thanksgiving

and we knew this was our chance to get Christmas up before we left for Texas.

We had gotten tree the night before and just left it in the garage.

A beauty.  Our best one ever.
Or so we thought.  More on that later...

So SG is way into smells...she can catch a whif of anything before
anyone else does, sometimes even her momma which is saying A LOT.

 Maybe she just has heightened senses in general...(they were using
a chainsaw to trim down our tree when I took this pic.  Guess it was too
loud for her.

So after E's party we got the tree out of the garage and
started the Goodbye Thanksgiving Welcome Christmas party!

It actually ended up being a lot of fun.

It was kind of a let's do a couple of fall activities we never got to do

while Trav got the tree put up and lights on it!

We decorated pumpkins...
sad faces because the pumpkins were sad to go.

Happy faces because they are excited that we get to celebrate Christmas!
(you don't need a lot of logic with a barely 4 year old and 2 year old!)

And fall sugar cookies that were forgotten in the fridge
in the midst of the Thanksgiving week.  We said Goodbye to
Thanksgiving by eating the Thanksgiving cookies...

And on to Christmas!
Helping hang the first ornaments...

Is this what they call "wide eyed wonder"

They were pretty into this...such a sweet memory.

We also got out their Christmas books and the Little People Nativity set Mimi gave them

that's always a favorite.  They play with it multiple times a day during the Christmas season.

One afternoon during December I walked into the living room and found this.

Something had been added to my nativity.

For some reason I loved this.  It brought me to tears when I saw it.

Ellie had done it.

It was as if she knew that her toy, her angel needed to be worshipping Baby Jesus too.

Oh that they got the message this Christmas.

Of Jesus.

Not of presents and parties and decorations.

But of Jesus.

I have sweet memories of decorating our house as a little girl growing up, then decorating our first house together as a married couple...and now it's so fun to share it our kids!