Christmastime activities hitherto unrecorded

The past few weeks have been full of many more activities than I've been able to keep up with, so here's a quick summary of some of the miscellany of this season:

1.) Many arts and crafts attempts. Usually the results were not quite the picturesque ones I had had in my mind, but we tried. This one, for example, was making popcorn strings for the tree. We learned that it takes a lot of popcorn, and a long time, to make a string of any substantial length. We also learned that it was much more fun to eat it than string it. And I spent most of the time fishing dropped pieces out of Miles "the human dustbuster's" mouth, who was camped out under the table.

2.) Fun with friends and the youth group: We've enjoyed a few different occasions with happy and crazy people... but the most memorable might be this game we introduced to our church youth group. Pete found the idea online... It was a game in which teams raced to make "reindeer antlers" out of panty hose and balloons... The results were quite funny:

3. Going to the Nutcracker. The kids thought the performance was "pretty cool" and they also got a kick out of seeing some of their friends dance in it!

4. My birthday. Always a major highlight of the year! This year's occasion was super-fun, starting with breakfast in bed, then lunch out (yay!) and shopping, and some of my extended family over for dinner. (We held a lottery to see which lucky members could join us... since Pete, who was making dinner, thought that the whole group might be a little more than he could handle. :) )

I'm very thankful to have married a professor, as that means he always has this time of year off from work and can focus his whole day on making it special for me!

I will say, though, this year is weird, since I am now actually older than the age I always think my mom is (36). Hmmmmmm.

5. Football by the light of the Christmas decorations.

6. Frolicking by the light of the Christmas decorations:

How thankful we are for the lights, the activities, the joy, the brightness and the True Light of the season!