Christmastime is Here!

Grant and Blake decorated this kid tree for Family Home Evening tonight. They hung the Disney ornaments from the Hobbs an strung noodles on yarn for garland. Grant especially loved decorating his Christmas tree with the colored ornaments. Blake loved playing with the bead garland he found.

"It's a Christmas tree!!" says Grant

A new addition this year, cute Santa placemats I made.

Our new giant tree. I had to stand on the porch to get this picture!

My latest finished project, an afghan for some friends.

Christmas got off to a shakey start this year. We have this beautiful new tree thanks to some generous friends of ours. The Whites moved and gave us this tree before they left. It's awesome!! We were afraid it was too big, but we just left off a few of the longer branches in the back so we could scoot it into the corner. So we get the tree assembled and start opening boxes looking for lights. We open a box and what do we find?? MOLD!!!!!!

The whole box was full of condensation and mold!! I freaked out thinking a pipe had leaked or something. Turns out, the pomegranates my dad brought me last year really needed MORE than three months to dry out. I thought they were completely dried, but they obviously had enough moisture in them to cause a whole rubbermaid bin of Christmas decorations to completely mold over!! It was so nasty! We lost our stockings, mini Christmas tree, gold chargers, kids books, and basically anything else in the box. Travis was really nice and cleaned up the whole mess, but we were only able to salvage a couple things. Thankfully everything can be replaced, but I'm pretty bummed about the stockings. I don't have time to make new ones, so I guess we'll go dollar store stockings this year and I'll make new ones next year.

As if things couldn't get any worse, it's now 10:30 because we had waited until after the kids were down to even start decorating. We open more boxes and find the lights. I plug the first strand in, broken. Second strand, broken. Third strand, broken. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh EIGHTH!! ALL BROKEN!!!! How does every strand of lights but one break while they sit in a box all year long?!?!?! They were all working when we packed them away. By now, we see what karma is telling us and decide to quit. Travis runs to Wal-mart to buy more lights and I begin packing away the ornaments for another night. $17 later (I hate paying full price for Christmas decorations), Travis is back and we give up for the evening.

Day 2: Sunday night we try again. We put "It's a Wonderful Life" back in the DVD player and start stringing lights. A new addition this year is twinkle lights. I bought two strands last year on clearance to wind through out the tree. They have 16 settings and the kids are mesmorized by them. All the new lights work and we have just enough for our new big tree. The ribbon garland and ornaments go up easily and we love our tree! Travis spends about ten minutes straightening our beautiful star and plugs it in. Just our luck, it won't turn on. hahaha