Christmas Traditions...The Countdown to Christmas

Only 15 more days until Christmas!

I'm back to share another of our family's Christmas traditions. My goal is to post one of our traditions each day leading up to Christmas, but as you can see, I've missed a few days. I'm having some trouble with our home computer.

Anyway, the tradition I want to share today is making gingerbread houses. Every year, our family (mostly Tristan with a little help from one of us) makes at least one gingerbread house. This year, though, we have the grand privilege of making three. The first house was made on our Thanksgiving trip to see my family. My mom, aka Nana, got Tristan a gingerbread house, and the two of them decorated it together. Tristan did most of the work, and I have to say, I think he did a pretty good job.Whenever you make a gingerbread house, you have to enjoy the candy and icing!The second gingerbread house was made by Tristan (with some help from daddy) at his school. Every year, they have a gingerbread party, and each child can invite one parent. Last year, I was chosen. This year, it was daddy. Here are some pictures of their fun:
The third gingerbread house is still in the box. It came via Mimi (Channing's mom). Tristan is chomping at the bit to get it out and decorated. I think we'll do it this week and will let Asher help too. Thing is, I'm pretty sure he'll just want to eat the candy. Oh well!

How about you? Does your family make gingerbread houses?

And here are a couple of shots of our Christmas trees. Just because...just because I love them!

Our kids' tree in the dining room:Our living room tree:

Christmas Traditions...The Countdown to Christmas

DAY 3~Only 21 more days until Christmas!

I missed a day because my sweet Ash is under the weather. I'll probably miss the next few days too. Who knows?

Today is day three of my posts sharing our family's Christmas traditions. My goal is to post one of our traditions each day leading up to Christmas.

One of my personal favorite traditions is doing our Christmas trees. Every year, we get a live tree and use an artificial tree. The artificial tree goes in our dining room. I call it our "kid tree". It's got the colored lights and the Santa, snowman, and reindeer ornaments. I also put all the ornaments the kids make on that tree. It's our super fun tree, and I love it!

This was our "fun tree" from last year after Tristan decorated it (before I fixed it and added the rest of the ornaments). See how all the ornaments are in the same spot at the bottom of the tree?

Our live tree goes in our living room. We always get a frasier fir (I think that's right). On this tree we put (ok, I put) white lights and all our other ornaments on it...the nativity scenes, our collected ornaments from trips...lots of stuff. It's our "pretty tree". We love it because it makes the house smell grrrrrrrrreat! And this year, we got an added bonus. We paid a THIRD for our tree than we have paid in year's past. Usually we pay about $90 for our tree (I know). This year, thanks to Marvins, we got a beautiful tree for $30!!! Isn't that awesome?! It looks just like the $90 trees, minus the extra green we had to spend!

Ok, so this was our tree from last year. It was looking pretty rough by Christmas day. See how it's leaning and all the branches are droopy? Yeah, it was ready to go. Oh, and does anyone know the trick for getting a good picture of your Christmas tree? With the lights on, the pictures look terrible, and with the lights off, their bad too. What am I doing wrong???

My dream is to one day have a tree in every room of our house. Each tree will have its own theme. Currently, we have plenty of ornaments, it's just the trees that we don't have. At the end of each December, I plan to buy an aritificial tree when it's on sale, but I never do. Maybe this year will be different??? My mom said that she'll give us her aritifical tree (the one that is not pre-lit). I'm thrilled with that because it will give us three! YEA!!!

So how do you do your tree(s)? Do you do one tree? More? Colored lights? White? Themes?
Share! I want to hear ALL about it!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS, AND GOD BLESS!