We decided to make some traditions, one being after the Thanksgiving break, that first weekend in December was decoration day. We had already helped my parents put up their decorations the traditional day after Thanksgiving in the Leopold house, and I couldn't wait for us to get home and get cracking at our own decorations and traditions.
So here is a list of our new yearly December traditions:
1. put up decorations
2. get a tree and decorate it (this was the only thing we did last year for Christmas, and we only had a handful of store bought ornaments, this year we had all my ornaments from growing up to add to the tree!)
3. go to a park and walk around and see all the lights (here we have City Park, in TX there's Central Park, and hopefully our next duty station will have a fun lit up park for us to go to)
4. watch holiday movies on the weekends
5. after putting up the tree and decorating it listening to Christmas music, we will watch some of the old school Rudolph and friends movies and drink hot cocoa
6. have a wonderful feast Christmas eve
7. bake cookies as a family and set out cookies and milk for Santa (we forgot to put the cookies out for Santa the night before, so we put them out that morning)
8. read the night before Christmas, the night before Christmas (which this year we forgot and had to wake Haiden up to read it with him)
9. go to some of the Christmas events they have on base
10. get pictures with Santa and Haiden
11. and the whole month of December listen/play Christmas music when ever possible
1. We had all of three decorations to put up, and put up lights outside.
2. Decorated the tree a few days later than we had planned, because the Trees for Troops trees hadn't come in yet.
Haiden screamed and cried the whole time we were decorating the tree, but as soon as we finished he was as happy as can be. So we started watching Rudolph and Friends movies (5).
3. We went to City Park and walked around looking at lights for about 3 hours! This place is huge to begin with, but they seriously had lights up for miles!
We had so much fun! There were lights everywhere and a section with trains!! There were probably about 10 trains running all at once around a mini village that was about the size of a street block.
6. We had some boys over from the barracks who weren't going home for Christmas and I cooked up a wonderful Christmas Eve feast!
I slaved over the stove for hours, but in the end it was worth it...even if our AC didn't work and it was 75 degrees outside, and all the cooking left the house a swampy mess...it was worth it. Haiden played dragon while the boys played video games and took naps. Then after the feast we made a fire, remembered that we were supposed to read The Night Before Christmas and woke Haiden up to do so. All in all, Christmas Eve turned out just like we had hoped.
7. I made snickerdoodles, bingo bars and Christmas themed cut-out cookies. And of course, being that we had such an eventful Christmas Eve, completely forgot to set them out for Santa...so the morning of Christmas we set them out and had Haiden in on the eating of cookies...poor Santa left our house hungry and thirsty, but he still left presents for Haiden :)
Then it was time to see what Santa brought and open gifts! We skyped my family and opened their gifts to us, and then skyped Zach's mom. Then we rested, and cleaned up a bit for my cousins who were coming to visit later in the afternoon.
After we finished opening presents, and chatting with our families back in Texas, Haiden was pooped!
Then my cousins got here, and we exchanged gifts...
Josh and Vanessa got Haiden an awesome ball mountain that took all three guys to put together! We got them homemade paintings for their house and a blank one for their little one on the way!!! They also got us an awesomely hilarious game called Quelf that had us all laughing for hours!
The day after Christmas I left with Haiden to go to Texas, where we opened even more presents and hung out with family and friends!
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