Up to Christmas

Christmas was very much looked forward to at our house this year. Tyler and Carsten have been singing Christmas songs forever. My favorite thing. :-) And we loved doing all of our fun advent activities. We did a lot of things, but some of our favorites were our advent calendar with verses and treats each day, lighting advent candles during our Bible story each night, and drawing fun activities from our Christmas jar each day. We drew things like watch a Christmas movie, have a dance party to Christmas music, play a family game and decorate a gingerbread house. Tyler told me his favorite was going to Caribou for Christmas coffee (mint hot chocolate). Although that was before we did the gingerbread house.

Our Christmas started on Thanksgiving Day. My family was here for Thanksgiving but we celebrated on Saturday. On actual Thanksgiving my parents went to New Ulm and we spent most of the day with just us at home. So we set up our Christmas tree! (Yay! :-))

We started with a breakfast of crepes. Do you see the excitement?

Eating around the island was an extra special treat. :-)

Tyler had fun unpacking the boxes.

He was also very sweet about teaching his brother to hang up ornaments!

They had so much fun decorating their little tree downstairs!

Here are a few other fun things we did in the days leading up to Christmas.

Christmas crafts!

They loved painting canvases for Christmas gifts this year. And they turned out really cute!

Opening early Christmas presents from Uncle Matt and Aunt Janelle.

Decorating our gingerbread house was a lot of fun! And surprisingly we managed to get a lot of candy on the house and not just in the mouths.

Family Candyland night!

We have lots of fun memories from Christmas this year and I'm so thankful for all the time we were able to spend as a family. December was a fun month around our house!