Favorite Christmas Traditions

I might have to give up on ever catching up!! We've had an incredible but busy fall!! Halloween was a ton of fun, Thanksgiving was here before we knew it and we had a great time in the mountains, and here I am sitting in the midst of an almost decorated house for Christmas. We have a super busy December this year so I've tried to be intentional about planning well so that Christmas doesn't pass by us without doing all the fun things we like to do with our boys and taking special care to not miss out on focusing on Christ among all the hectic comings and goings. With each passing year, I love how Cort is able to grasp more and more about what it really means when we celebrate Christmas and am excited to begin really sharing that with Cohen.

We have several things we do through the month to both have fun and celebrate Jesus well. We have an advent book with punch out nativity pieces that Cort adores. And last year we started doing the Jesse tree. We make a birthday cake for Jesus and eat it on Christmas morning for breakfast. Cohen has really enjoyed the little people nativity set this year. A few other traditions we love are the holiday parades, Christmas cards, cutting down our Christmas tree, and having our Christmas tree decorating party.

We went again this year with the Burn's to cut down our tree in Brevard. It makes planning our Christmas Cards easy now because I always plan on taking a picture there for the card. In years past, I have tended to use Shutterfly for our Christmas Cards as well as for other Christmas gifts, like Calendars and Mugs. This year, I'm even thinking of using them to make photo invites for Cort's birthday party!! By far, my favorite Christmas card was the Shutterfly one we used with Cohen's first Christmas!! So fun to send those out!! And I'm especially loving them this year since they are offering a pretty awesome free deal to bloggers for doing a little advertising post - you can find out about it here. I love sending Christmas cards and keeping all of our from years past as a way to walk down Memory lane. I also love getting all the photo Christmas cards and stringing them up in our foyer!! So fun to have all our friends and family around us!

The hardest part about the Christmas cards to me is choosing from all the great card options!! I dont want to share what I've chosen this year for our card, so it won't spoil it, but here's a few pictures from our Christmas tree adventure that we didn't use:







And I love this series of the kids and seriously could have posted like 15 more of these but i'll spare you...for now anyway......




Doesn't it look like Cohen is really proclaiming something quite important here?.....