Christmas Home Tour

Today I'm going to show you around our home, and share some of our Christmas decorations.

We'll start outside.

The gate on the side of the house is decked out in snow and a wreath.

Here's our front porch.  I have an old sled and a little tree by the door, and a wooden snowflake hanging above the window.

Here's how it looks at night.  The lights on the tree are twinkling lights and look so cheery!

This is the back entry, with a little wreath and sparkly bells.

The dining room is decked out with a skinny tree which has no decorations besides lights.  There's also trees on the shelf, Christmas pictures hanging up and the joy banner which was made by a blog friend many years ago.

This kissing ball is hanging from the light over the table. It was a gift from a patient several years ago. She has since passed away and I enjoy remembering her when I put this up.

This is on the table, I made the ornaments using decals.

Here's some Christmas treats for you too. The two layer peppermint fudge is very easy to make and the recipe for it can be found here.

Here is the tree lit up in the evening. 

Next to the dining room is one of my favorite Christmas things; the card holder.  It's so fun to get cards from family and friends, including some of you!

We even have a few decorations in the main bathroom.

In the living room is the Christmas Tree!  We don't have a big room, so the tree isn't real big either.

I have decorations set out on the side tables,

and also on this shelf, along with a wreath on the mirror.

This is one of my favorites - a Santa that Bob carved quite a few years ago.  Isn't he cute?

Of course, we need a Nativity set to remember the real reason for the season.  This one is a toddler friendly set that I made when I was a mentor mom for MOPS.

This one was made by our daughter Laura when she was 16. It has the wisemen and shepherds, but also cows, horses, sheep, and even chickens!

Last, but not least is the fireplace.  Bob put this fireplace in this past summer, so this is the first time I got to decorate a mantle.  There are snowflakes, trees, deer and the stockings. I also found the cute deer to stand next to the fireplace.

Here's a closer picture of the stockings.  I decided it was to hard to put up stockings for everyone, and just put them up for the grandkids.


Thanks for coming on my home tour!

Family party

On Saturday we had our family party with my siblings and kids. It was a smaller group this year as 4 of the grandkids now live out of state, and Laura and Aaron had his family party today. We also were in the middle of another winter storm, with very cold temps - 4 degree wind chill!  But the rest of us made it and had a good time.

We had an ugly sweater contest which my sister Cheri won.  Here she is with her husband Mark.  You have to admit, that sweater is pretty bad!

Here's my sister Terri with her daughters Katelyn and Chelsea. Their guys didn't come wearing an ugly sweater, so it's only those 3 in the picture.

Heather, Andrew, Cassie and Connor were all decked out.  Unfortunately, I didn't think to get one of Bob and I, and I missed a few others too...

Here's the whole gang!

Cassie had fun...

So did Connor!

Connor actually sat with my brother for awhile.

We had plenty to eat!

We played games and everyone had fun, and we all made it safely home through the snow.

UPDATE:  You may remember that Alaina was scheduled to have an ablation on her heart to take care of the issue with the fast heart rate.  It was done on Monday afternoon, she is home and is doing well.  She's a little sore and has to take it easy for the week but otherwise ok. The doctor is confident they found the problem spot.  Thanks for your prayers!

Light show

We had a fun Christmas activity last week.  A Drive through Christmas Light and Music show was set up in a nearby town. We thought it would be fun to take our girls to see it.

We picked them all up and started the evening by taking them out for supper.  

They all like Culvers, so that's where we had supper.

They enjoyed supper, especially the frozen custard!

We got done eating earlier than we thought, so we made a short trip to the Dollar Store.  Inflation has struck even the dollar stores. This one had lots of things for $7!  But we did find a few good things.

Then it was time to head to the Light Show!

The light show was set up on a Fairground and covered a large area. We had to set our radio at a certain spot and get Christmas music that was synchronized to the lights.

There were lots of light tunnels to go through.

Along the way, there were elves in the displays that kids were supposed to find.  The elves and other characters were dancing to the music. They even had lighted snowmen throwing snowballs to each other.

The lights were changing colors and blinking to the music too.

There was a nativity scene, which was bigger than just this picture.  It had the shepherds, angels and animals which are not in this picture.

There was a whole section to honor the military, police, medical and first responders.

This one said In God We Trust.

When we got to the end the staff asked the girls how many elves they found. They found 10 - all of them.  It took about 25 minutes to drive through, we all thought it was great!

After we brought the kids home, we drove through our own mini light show. This is the boulevard in our town.  It's lit up all the way through town which is a few miles.  We think our town has the best lights around!   :)