Pre-Christmas, Part 1

The day after Thanksgiving we traditionally pull out all our Christmas decorations and deck out the whole house.  We celebrate accomplishing this feat by watching The Polar Express and having hot chocolate. 

The christmas tree didn't get decorated on that day (thanks to a needy baby), so a few nights later the kids all got to help put on ornaments.  It drove Aubree crazy that Thane and Graham were so haphazard in their ornament placement.  As I watched, I thought to myself, "As soon as they go to bed I'm fixing everything!"

Once they finally went to bed though, I realized I'm more tired/lazy than I am OCD.  I left the ornaments exactly where there were and thought, "meh. I'll just be taking them down in a couple weeks anyway."

A huge windstorm swept through and left us without power for 28 hours.  When our fantastic neighbor started up his generator, he sent an extension cord over the fence to our house so we could run our refrigerator and not lose all our food.  Thankfully the weather was mild so we weren't cold in our house.  

The first weekend in December is the annual Celebrate the Nativities event.  This year Mark agreed to participate in the live nativity, so Nellie got to play the role of baby Jesus.  I swaddled her tightly, and she slept for the majority of our one hour shift.  Super authentic... except for the pink paci in her mouth!

Later the whole family joined in on the nativity action.

Aubree and Bryce participated in the children's choir.  Aubree played her violin for one song and sang in a small group for another.  Bryce got to ring the bells for yet another song.  They both enjoyed it, though Bryce is trying to convince me that he doesn't really like performing.

As we tried to pull out to head to their performance, we discovered our driveway was blocked by the Santa fire-truck!  This is an excellent community event where the firetruck brings lights, music, and Santa through the neighborhoods to collect food for the food bank.  This time around the timing just wasn't so great.

Speaking of nativities, what would Christmas be without our traditional salt dough nativities?  This year we invited two families over to join us.  That made for a pretty wild night, but everybody's nativity sets turned out so well!

Jensens

Rasbands

Winters

Another night we met up with Katie and her family to visit the famed Snowflake Lane in Bellevue.  We were excited to see the parade.  Turns out "parade" is an overly generous term.  Maybe "stationary parade" would be slightly more accurate.  We were underwhelmed.  But, now we can say we've done it.  The kids all got lollipops, so I'm sure they'll remember it fondly.

And since this post is short on Nellie pictures, here are a couple cute ones just because.