Decking the Halls and Giving to Charities this Year

Our home is ready for Christmas. We always decorate as soon as the Thanksgiving dishes are washed. It is a tradition around here. I love Advent and want to be able to enjoy every drop of the season. Our local live tree stand stays open on Thanksgiving, and we were there to pick our tree right after Thanksgiving lunch. I love a real tree. Rebekah really wanted to do a pink theme this year when she saw tons of pink bobbles at the thrift store and the guys relented. We got our wrapping paper at T.J. Max. 

Yes, we are already done shopping and the gifts are wrapped and under the tree. I think in our worry that we wouldn't be organized this year (with my new job and two weeks of Nutcracker performances), we went into organized overdrive. However, it is nice to be done and just able to enjoy the season. We have a book and sock theme going for gifts this year. Just about everyone asked for books of some kind, and we are crazy sock people that just love fun socks. 

One of my real goals with our living room was to be able to move around the furniture very easily to accommodate different activities throughout the year. To make room for the tree, we reversed the sofas and  moved the game table to be in front of the book cases. We did not pull out all of the Christmas decor this year, because we just felt too busy. Plus, we also have a huge exciting event coming just days after Christmas that meant the house needs to be a bit streamlined this year. 

The Advent house has chocolate in it. 

My snowmen are scattered through my "pretty things" shelves this year. I really like them there and wonder why I never thought of it before. 

I didn't get a picture of the nativity this year because it is in the rec room, but it looks the same as every year. Most likely there are a few figures lying down at any given moment because of cats walking through it. Good thing the figures are made of resin so are hard to break. 

Our Charities this Season ~ 

We decided to make our charity giving more monetary this year instead of our typical volunteer and making charity boxes. We did decide to do a reverse Advent calendar this year...each day the kids put into the basket an item of food before getting their chocolate out of the Advent house. By Christmas Eve we will have 24 food items to drop off at the local food bank. 

In addition to that, Rebekah really wanted to do something for Ukraine and we decided to make a contribution to UNICEF.  Elijah really wanted to purchase an animal from Heifer International and not just any animal -- a water buffalo. The water buffalo was a bit out of our price range with everything else we wanted to do, so we decided to buy a few shares in a water buffalo. 

Lastly, we decided to send small checks to the first three local charities that reached out to us, which ended up all being animal shelters in a 50 mile radius.  

I hope to post another update next week with all things Nutcracker. We are deep in Nutcracker season and college finals week around here. So far, we are all healthy. I hope that holds.

Blessings, Dawn