Christmas Traditions

We are enjoying every minute of this Christmas season. This year marks a first for our family. This will be the first year that we'll spend Christmas here at our house, and not in Virginia with my family. I will really miss spending Christmas morning at my Grandma's house as I've done for the last 25 years, but I'm SO excited to start making some new traditions here at home with our family. It's crazy to not have to think about traveling anywhere this time of year, as that's just all we've ever known in the 4 years that we've been married. We've got something extra special coming our way this Christmas, and something tells me she'll be wrapped in a big pink bow (but not too big, right dan?!)!

We've wasted no time on jumping into the Christmas spirit. We put our decorations up a few days before Thanksgiving, Christmas music has been on all day long for weeks, and our DVR is starting to fill of classic Christmas movies. I always had a chocolate advent calendar growing up, and my mom sent one for Eli this year. He looks forward to opening his special treat every night, and then we do the Jesse tree as a family. We're so thankful that Nana made (with lots of love!) Jesse tree's for all of us to do with our kids each December. Eli's especially loved getting to hang a new ornament on the tree each night. It's nice for him to have constant visual reminders of the stories and verses that we've read each night.

We don't dare try to 'help' him with this hanging task...he takes this job very seriously!
We started off the month of December with a family movie night. We had plenty of popcorn, and watched the original Rudolph movie.
New christmas pj's and a freshly decorated tree...just a few of my favorite things :).
This morning we went to the annual Bluffton Christmas parade. It's something I always look forward to, and knew that Eli would love it even more this year.
This is Eli at the parade last year. He still looked like such a baby!

This year we went with Molly and Amelia again.
We both have baby girls on the way due about 8 weeks apart, so we had fun talking about what we'll look like next year at the parade ;).


Eli was in absolute heaven with all of the big trucks, tractors, rescue vehicles and animals! And let's not forget the endless amounts of candy being thrown his way...I don't think he minded that at all.

It's only December 3rd, so I'm excited about all of the fun Christmas parties, cookie exchanges, and traditions that we'll take part in as we wait in anticipation for Christmas day. And to make it that much sweeter, we are just 4 weeks or less away from meeting Layla Grace!