A Simple Christmas

The girls with some branches we gathered.

 As most of you know - life has been a bit busy and different for us this year with building our house and living in various unique situations meanwhile. We had thought that our house would be done before Christmas but that didn't end up being the case and so life was just generally still in a state of upheaval and so it made it so that Christmas was a little different this year.

  No hours and hours spent making lots of different homemade gifts. (At least not for me - I think Mara did spend hours and hours on some homemade gifts.)

 No decorating of the house from top to bottom.

 No Christmas lights.

 No Christmas letters sent out (though I printed pictures and we are hoping to get a letter sent out soon with a change of address - we just didn't find the time before Christmas).

And so on.

Though it has always been our goal to have a simple Christmas anyway this year it simply was all we were able to manage and that was fine. In fact it was great.

We did have fun one lovely day last week (we had some days that got above freezing which we truly enjoyed!) going out and gathering some evergreen branches from some of our trees)

 It started with just the girls but Aaron thought it would be fun to join us with his hatchet.

Our rule for Christmas is that all gifts must fit in one's stocking. The trouble was this year is that our stockings were all packed away in storage in a room at Ken's office and we really had no idea where the stockings were in the major stack of boxes. We discussed many alternate ideas such as using our real socks, or maybe boots, or pillowcases but the kids really didn't like those ideas. So the Sunday before Christmas we went to Ken's office after church and had a major hunt and after moving many things we finally found the box with the stockings. I wouldn't have packed them so deep but I thought that we were going to be all moved in by Christmas time.

   The week before that Aaron had gone and found a board to be our temporary mantles piece as our permanent one isn't done yet. He had got all the nails in for hanging the stockings and everything.

In our decorating Mara used some greenery to dress up our untrimmed dining room doors.

On Christmas Eve we came up with the idea of having a Sound Effects Contest. The idea came from all the weird sounds that the boys like to make at any given moment. Mara typed up rules and came up with categories and so forth. Ken (with his lovely microphone - a play one - that he likes to pull out for special occasions) was the judge and moderator. It ended up making for a pretty silly but memorable evening.

Christmas morning. We all slept in (it stays pretty dark down in the basement where we are still sleeping and we were tired) but then got up and had our big traditional breakfast of Vanocka Braid, Hot Chocolate stirred with Candy Canes, Eggs, Bacon (normally we have sausage so we did vary a little) and fruit. Then we opened gifts.

My parents and brother Peter and family came over for lunch and then we played games and had a little music. In the evening we watched - "It's a Wonderful Life".

 It was a lovely day and we had fun enjoying our simple Christmas.

 Did you have a good Christmas? I would love to hear about it!