Christmas Time is Here

We got our Christmas decorations out during Thanksgiving weekend as we usually do and I was so excited to see it all! I love Christmas time! 

Annabel started baking right away! First up- Peanut Butter Blossoms. Yum.

The kids got their new ornaments to put on the tree first, as we always do. This year's ornaments for Annabel included a Squishmallow ornament (these plush are all the rage right now!), a felt whale with a Santa hat (bringing back memories of our amazing whale watching excursion in Alaska), and a Harry Potter book ornament. Daniel got a Home Alone newspaper ornament, a Lego Minifigure ornament- the Yeti (I love these- and realized we have quite the collection of these from Hallmark), and a tourist Mickey (because we were Disney cruise tourists this year). So fun to add memories and more cuteness to our tree!

Ben and Daniel took advantage of the warm weather and put up our outdoor lights and hung my wreath. Cosmo even got to sit out there and watch!

Annabel wanted candy canes...specifically Skittles one. I bought them one grocery trip in early December and then hid them on the tree for her to find. It took her 5 days to realize they were on the tree! It was so funny!

 Look at these cute Christmas-past memories!

I LOVED doing this new Christmas puzzle. It had a matte finish for one thing- so no glare, which was amazing. And it was just a really fun one to put together, with a countdown to Christmas theme tied into it (not an advent, where you do one a day, but just a collection of 25 cute images). Lots of fun. I now want more matte finish puzzles and I have no idea how to find them. It was a complete surprise with this one- I just lucked out, but I'm sure glad to have experienced that- it really was a nice feature.

I'm enjoying the Jacquie Lawson advent calendar on my computer again. This year has featured several fun new things so far, which make it more unique to other years. This was good, since it was getting to be sort of the same things year after year, but I still take delight in each day in this advent calendar. I'm looking forward to the rest of the month with this! This picture is a scene from one of the days- I liked it because it's Santa on the saxophone, one of Annabel's instruments- how perfect!

Annabel's friend Aggie brought her a sweet Christmas present! So nice! And fun to have an early Christmas present!

This year, I have a couple new bookshelves in my library, so I loaded one of them up with all my Christmas books. I usually use a couple shelves on my big wall bookshelf, but this seemed far easier to do (easier to empty and all), plus, the books all make a nice collection together in this little shelf. I loved it and plan to do this going forward. It was so sweet and such fun to have a special place for them to stand out.