Tis The Season

I love Christmas.  But if you know me, you probably already knew this about me.  The period between Thanksgiving and New Year's is so much fun, and I always have a big list of things I want to experience with my family.  Now I have two children with two birthdays thrown into the mix, and I'm realizing that I need to tailor back a bit and do a little less Christmas so that we can incorporate some birthday fun too.   Still, there are some things that we always will do in the Kovar house.

First, there are the advent calendars.  This year we had a lot!  We had the one that I made a couple of years ago, the standing calendar that we change the date on every day, the chocolate-filled calendar we bought during our Leavenworth trip, a chain-a-day calendar from Charlie's preschool and an advent calendar for each boy from Grandma Boyce.  We did every calendar every day leading up to our trip to California.  Charlie always knew what the date was!  It was a lot of fun.  Ephram even loved his advent calendar from Grandma.  He would peek behind the flap really carefully at first, and then a little more forcefully until the flap would break away.  When I pulled it out every morning, he would start kicking with excitement!

Of course there's the Christmas tree and the baking of cookies too.  This year we made three kinds of cookies - snickerdoodles, sugar and funfetti cake mix.  They were tasty.  Charlie says his favorites were the sugar cookies because he liked "punching" them out.  My favorites were the cake mix cookies, they tasted as close to Lofthouse cookies as I think I've ever gotten.  After we were done baking we made little treat bags and delivered them to all of our neighbors.  Charlie was really excited to get his Santa practice in!

We did plenty of inside caroling, watched a ton of Christmas specials and made some crafts too.  The season always comes and goes so quickly - I find myself trying to figure out how to make it seem longer every year.  Maybe next year I'll start in October.  :)