It's Christmas Time

It is Christmas time!  I love this season.  I love the family time, I love the decorations, I love the cold.  Yea...I do.  Mostly because I LOVE having a fire in our fireplace.

Just like the rest of you our Christmas season can get busy and hectic.  Broderick's birthday is the 1st, Rob's is the 8th, our anniversary is the 30th and then we have all the other Christmas things added in.  We always love to do the "extra" activities.  In our area, as I am sure in most, there are ALL kinds of  "extras".  Sometimes these extras can become a distraction.  Especially for us.  We feel like we have to do it ALL.  That can be overwhelming and add stress.

However, this Christmas season, Rob and I agreed we needed to shift our focus.  While doing those extra things are fun and not bad, we just needed to really check ourselves.  We found a family advent study to do which has been great.  We have also only picked a few things we really wanted to go and see.  Of course we took the kids to see Santa...

We have gone to the same place for about 4 years.  It is a park in our area where you drive through the light display and then at the end they have an indoor play area, Santa land, carolers, snacks, and a train display.

We celebrated Broderick's birthday of course.  This year he had his first sleepover.

And the family came over a different night for cake...

We did a new thing this year.  We have an old Pioneer Village in our area that does a candlelight tour for Christmas.  It was really cool...freezing, but neat.

We finished this night in a near by town that also had a special Christmas event.  We ate at a little mom and pop restaurant with home cooked food and walked around the town.  It was a fun night.
We celebrated Rob's birthday by staying home hunkered down by the fire with movies, games and family time.  (This is becoming a Sunday tradition around our house.  We LOVE chilling by the fire all day!)

One thing I have done, this Christmas season, is started Ann Voscamp's new advent devotional "The Greatest Gift."  It has been amazing.  If you are friends with me on Facebook you have seen my daily status updates have been quotes from the book.  I can not tell you how much this book is speaking right to my heart.  God is using it to speak truth to real life things I am facing...daily.  Every single day there is something she has written that God breaks me with.  If you need a devotion for next year, or want to start now...I encourage you to get it!

So far this Christmas has been different.  It is so nice to slow down and focus on Jesus more, and enjoy and not be stressed by all the stuff.  I am looking forward to the next couple weeks.

Praying your Christmas season is blessed too!