Christmas-y

We began our Christmas season with the Advent Festival at our church.  This special evening included Christian's choir singing along with a living nativity and the Christmas story. 

Christian is on the bottom row, all the way to the right.  He was quite funny to watch; it was very sweet to hear the choir singing Advent carols.  They all did a wonderful job and were rewarded in the end...

Eliana was eyeing Christian's cookie.

She was excited to be there, and did a little dance.

While we do have a third child, she was flitting about with her friends. 

Speaking of cookies...the kids really wanted to make Christmas cookies this year.  So, we rolled out the dough and brought out the cookie cutters and I even made frosting for them.  They had such a blast decorating these cookies!  They pretty much did it all by themselves. 

They also had fun making snowflakes.  I don't know if they have ever done this before or not, but it seemed new and exciting to them.  They enjoyed coming up with creative ways to cut their paper and make the snowflake designs.  It took a couple of tries to figure out how to get roundish ones rather than square ones. 

Eliana must be involved in all things, everywhere...

Our next project was to put up our Christmas tree.  Our tree this year is made out of paper, which in turn was made out of a tree.  So, in the end it is a tree. 

Every Christmas tree needs ornaments...

 

They loved decorating this tree, and worked well together.  They were putting up the lights.  This is the first year our tree has had colored lights! 

The angels, of course...

At the heart of the season...

And here's something that's always fun (or sometimes fun, or maybe not at all, but everyone gets sweaty trying and in the end you hope you have something that was worth all that time and energy).  This year, taking our Christmas picture was relatively simple, and the kids had fun with it.

Look at all these cute toes...

Smiles are contagious, no?

Looking back at these pictures it seems like Christmas is all about the kids.  In some ways that is very true.  They find so much joy in little things, in the anticipation, in the remembering, in being together, in meaningful work, and in eating cookies!  Looking at these pictures also makes me realize how much I need to learn from their example, and allow the beauty of Christmas to affect me.  It's simple for them.  May it be so always.