St. Louis Christmas IV

I love being able to give Christmas presents to everyone, but coming from a family of 6 children who now have 17 of our own children, well, its challenging to make it fit into the budget especially when you think of having to ship things. I used to shop all through the year and delight in finding great bargains that people could actually enjoy, but you can't really do that as much when you live 1000 miles away. Now the requirement is great bargains, that people will actually like, that are small and light enough to fit in a suitcase.

This year I decided to order most gifts from LTD Commodities. Some years it seems like they have nice things and this was one of those years.

Stan got a little lab beanie baby. When he came to visit last May he loved the one we had. He played with it and carried it with him everywhere. I told Becky he could take it home. WOOPS! When I told Russ he said, "NO you can't give Buster away". Buster was Russ's first lab that had cancer and suffered terrible seizures for about year before he died. Russ cared for him and had many nights of rushing him to the vet in the wee hours of the morning. He died and Russ had to bury him. I cry every time I think about it.

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The older boys got marshmallow guns--guns that shoot mini marshmallows. I thought they would like to shoot each other and then eat the ammo. They didn't work as well as I thought they would but...

When you look at this next sequence of photos, which is the dads and grandpa trying to figure out how the guns work, guess who is the engineer in the family.

St. Louis Christmas III

Hanging Out

St. Louis Christmas II

Part of my family meets for worship at my brother Dave's house. So far its just my brother Dave's family, Becky's family, mom and dad and the Bright family. But when I came the whole family met together for Sunday worship. It was a blessing to see all the little ones sitting there. We pray the Lord will give them new hearts soon so that they will be part of the spiritual family as well.

St. Louis Christmas

William and I flew to St. Louis in mid December to spend 5 days with my family. They were fun days packed full with seeing family and friends. Mom, dad, Becky, Brian, William and I spent a Saturday at St. Charles. We saw the Christmas parade, wished Mr. Scrouge a Merry Christmas and ate chesnuts roasted over an open fire.

Christmas Decorations

Here a few shots of our house at Christmas time. I didn't take any of the outside this year, but we have wreaths on every window on the first floor and a single candle in every window.

This doesn't relate to Christmas but we added several permanent "decorations" to our house right before Thanksgiving. We had a copy facsimile of a 1775 map of NC framed and matted and then we hung it over the mantle. The frame and matting was what we decided to give to each other for our 1st anniversary. Your 1st anniversary is paper so we thought that would be kind of cool.

We bought an area rug from Lowes for our living room and we also had two prints that Susan and Randy gave us for our wedding matted and framed. These we hung in our dining room.

This is a "fuzzy book" my dad had when he was a little boy. Russ is not a huge fan of Santa but so far he has gone along with it. However, we didn't get William's picture taken with the jolly fat elf this year.

I was so happy to be able to put up the snow people this year. With the exception of last year, I've celebrated Christmas with this snow family every year since I was one or two. After last Christmas, mom and dad gave them to us. William loved them. Every morning when we got him up we would walk into the living room and they were the first things he would see. He loves people and he must have recognized the snow people's faces and thought they were real. He would always smile really big and wave his arms. It was so cute.

Getting Ready for Christmas

Being 1000 miles away from my mom and dad and sisters and brothers is hard to say the least. I always feel a tad disloyal when I choose to stay home for the important holidays rather than travel to be with them. However, I know they understand. After all, it was Dad who taught us the importance of establishing traditions within the immediate family circle.

So we stayed home for both Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. I did very much enjoy that. I was able to devote more time to getting our house decorated and the special cookies and foods prepared. But I didn't get everything accomplished that I had hoped to. Nowhere near, if the truth be known. Christmas is a lot of work!! And it takes a lot of preparation and planning ahead of time for the mom a.k.a., me, to be able to do what needs to be done AND to enjoy it. That's what I've learned in the last two Christmas.


Setting out to find a tree. We only visited one lot this year.

I wonder how many couples have to work out the issue of "how to decorate a Christmas Tree". Thankfully I have a husband who is more than willing to allow me complete freedom in all matters of home and holiday decore'. Not only that, but he even goes along with all the particulars and enjoys the process with me. So all our ornaments "hang". Which means they sway back and forth unimpeded if the tree gets jostled a bit. No ornaments are hung on light wires, although I did have to take one or two off and little ornaments are hung at the top and then the ornaments get progressivley bigger as you get to the bottom of the tree.

The whale tail ornament we got on our honeymoon so long ago.

Sunrise

I know its been a long time since I posted, but tonight, while my husband is watching the playoffs, football for those who don't know, I'm blogging. I've scheduled a new post each day so for awhile you can visit every day and know you'll see something new.