Twas the Night Before Christmas....

I love this time of year!

I love sitting with my children and reading books in the rocking chair.

I love making them hot chocolate on a cold day (not that we've had many of those).

I love taking all day to make sugar cookies from scratch and decorating them right before we eat them! Yummy!

I love to bake at Christmas. Really, I don't bake all that much during the rest of the year. There is just something about this time.

Traditions are important to us at Christmas. Of course, we can't always keep them all...but we try! For Christmas Eve we have a pretty good set of traditions. First, we attend our church's Christmas Eve service. This service has changed from year to year but I love them all and always look forward to it. This year was extra special because some of our very good friends (and neighbors) were baptized on Christmas Eve. What an exciting and bittersweet time for us. See, Tisha and her family have become like family to us. We've been neighbors for less than two years but God brought them into our lives for a purpose and we love them tremendously. They moved to TN yesterday and we knew that the Christmas Eve service would mark their final time in our church. Praise God that the entire family recently accepted Christ and most were baptized Wed. night. What a wonderful, exciting time. We also celebrated the Lord's supper and for me it was one of the more meaningful events of the year. God is so good to us and I truly thank Him for this blessed year.

Once we got back home we continued with our normal traditions. First, we read the Night Before Christmas. My mom read this very same pop-up book version to me ever since I can remember. She gave the book to me and we still read it each and every year. We also read a book about Jesus' birth. We actually read two different ones this year because we like them both. Next we put out the reindeer food (I mean the reindeer have to eat too! They're the ones doing all of the work!) on the front porch. The kids love to check to see if the food was eaten on Christmas morning. Finally, we set out the cookies and milk for Santa that we made earlier in the day. This year it was chocolate chip cookies and a couple of mint chocolate chip cookies. I think Santa liked them.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we always make a gingerbread house at some point during the holidays. Well, this year we had a bunch of the neighborhood kids over to help us on Christmas Eve. We didn't plan it but they showed up and had a wonderful time. I just left them to it. It turned out pretty good. I put a couple of those pics on here as well.

I'm sorry that my pictures are all out of order. I have no idea what has changed with Blogger but I can't drag and place my pics where I want them anymore. Maybe when I get time I'll figure it out...until then just enjoy the pics all jumbled up! :)

I'll post pics from Christmas Day later. I hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas!


Jill