Christmas 2011

Our Christmas celebration this year was WAY toned down from previous years. Back at Thanksgiving, I made a list of all of the things I wanted to do at Christmas: cookie plates for teachers and neighbors, make homemade gifts for the family, cards, gifts for the kids, and decorate the new place up to the hilt. Then reality set in, along with my fibro treatments, and we had to change our focus. We had already decided not to go to Illinois, but rather stay home and let me continue to get better. Rob decided we would not decorate too much, so we focused on the tree, mantle area (finally, stockings hung by a fireplace!), and our countdown calendar. Our home was festive yet it did not exhaust me to decorate it.

Then came all of the handmade stuff. It became pretty apparent early on in the month that I was not up to making gifts as usual this year, so we had to eschew all gift making, including cookies. I hated to do it, but we decided to just focus on gifts for our family of five. The only thing I really kept up was the card making (so if you got a card, that's your gift this year!) I tried to think ahead and each time I had a card event, I made extras, so by the time I sat down to do the cards, I had most of them already done. Praise the Lord for thinking ahead!

We did have fun spoiling the kids. Various family members sent up presents, so we had quite the slew of gifts under our tree Christmas morning. It was so fun to watch them rip into everything. I'll post later on what they got. Rob's parents were able to make a trip up to see us one weekend, so they did get some grandparent time as well.

We also attended our church's Christmas Eve service, which was fun for all of us. It was mostly music, which the kids enjoyed, and the best part was when our pastor called up all of the children to the stage. He sat with them and read the Christmas story from Luke 2. Our children just loved it! We also had them with us for the service on Christmas Day and it was so special to sit with all three of them.

So our celebration was low-key this year, but just perfect for us.