Pre-Christmas

This ornament (a present from my visiting teacher) sums up my holiday season:

It really was one of the nicest Christmases I've had in awhile. The whole month was really great. As you saw, Ame's shower and the Nativity display were great. The Christmas devotional was great. I also had fun swapping white elephant gifts with the YSA. From what I gather, Rene's wedding in Utah went well.

We got a really good tree from our local nursery:

It was fun to see people's lights:

The Corry green was lit up nice as well:

And so was our house!

We had fun shopping at the mall as a family:

I loved this display tree at Old Navy!

Laura had Grant shopping with us too, he did surprisingly well:


I have a tree growing out of my head, lol:

On the 23rd, us YW (and some RS and Primary) went caroling, which was so much fun. We had wanted to do it last year but schedules and snow prevented us. The girls were so excited, many of them had never been caroling before. We sang all around the local nursing home, the people there were happy to see us. We then went to a couple of member's homes, it was fun to sing to them as well. I also had really nice VT visits with my ladies that same day.

On Christmas Eve, we walked outside as a family and left bread and apples for the deer and critters. We also always read the Christmas story in the Bible on Christmas Eve and hang up stockings as well.

We got our tree up late (we're always late but this year we were really late!), Mom and I got it in the house on the 22nd and we weren't finished decorating til the 24th, but I didn't really need a tree to make me feel merry, it came from within. I really tried to focus on others instead of worrying about me and I think that really helped.