52/52: Christmas Prep

I'm not sure I got any pictures at ALL during the Octave of Christmas (aside from our family pictures), and now the camera battery is dead and the charger is missing so we'll see when any new pictures get taken in general... But here's some of our Christmas prep!

It took until just a few days before Christmas for us to set up a "manger" for Baby Jesus, and even then the "manger" was a box that was really too big, the "straw" was random multi-colored eyelash yarn from my mom's stash, and the whole thing DEFINITELY did not fill up in time for Christmas. But it's okay! Everybody was so delighted by the process that it was 100% worth it. We also chose "Secret Santa" buddies for the five older kids, although we had to do it twice because Peter got himself the first time around... And then Cecilia threw a fit because she didn't WANT Peter, but got him the second time. When I reminded her that Peter is really easy to please and really fun to shop for, she got over it pretty quickly.

My sister took all the kids shopping for $5 presents for their Secret Santa and the gifts/process were a HUGE hit. Note for next year: do this again, for sure!

On Christmas Eve Eve (or Christmas Adam) we dried clementine slices and tried making garlands out of popcorn, clementine slices, and cranberries. Sadly, everyone got tired of stringing and ended up eating most of the ingredients so... Maybe next year I'll just buy pom poms and let them make garlands out of those?

Then everyone headed to the woods to pick out a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. It ended up too tall so Andrew had to lop off the top and it is HUGE and taking up such a ridiculous amount of space! Honestly I'm a little bit of a grinch and always love taking the tree DOWN because there's so much more space and everything's so much cleaner, but it'll stay up as long as Andrew holds out, because there's no way I'm taking it down myself... I mean obviously I wouldn't take it down before Epiphany, and it's very much alive so it's not a safety hazard, it's just SO BIG you guys. And ornaments fall off every time someone brushes against it! But the kids really adore it, and they were so delighted putting all the ornaments on and only broke one (a few days after Christmas our order of unbreakable ornaments arrived because I realized so many have broken over the years that the tree looks kind of naked, so now we have a whole lot of birds and woodland animals and almost no glass balls left).

Aaaaanyway... That's our Christmas prep in a nutshell! Most of the decorations are up, although there are a few we didn't get around to this year because I'm too pregnant to care. And now we decide whether I cave and order a new camera battery charger off of Amazon (only to find the missing one immediately afterwards, I'm sure) or whether I just don't post until I find the charger. What will win out??? Frugality? The need for posterity? Only time will tell...