It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

I love the holiday season!  It's such a fun time of year and there is so much to do and see.  It's so exciting.

Strapping it to the top of Andrew's pathfinder

4.  Buy a Christmas Tree
Andrew and I did buy a Christmas tree.  We both love the smell and joy of having a real Christmas tree and so we went out to a lot close to our home and picked a small tree out the Saturday before our ward Christmas party.  It was really cold that day and starting to snow so we made our decision pretty quickly.

"Now this isn't one where all of the needles fall off, is it?"

I was nervous about it having spiders and asked the guy who sold it to us if it had a "spider-free guarantee" but he laughed at me and told me that he personally knew they were COVERED in spiders.  Thank you, Mr. Salesman.  But so far we haven't seen a single living creature crawling around on or near the tree so I think we shook it out pretty well.  Phew!

We love our tree!  It's so nice to have in our home. We rescued an old tree stand from the Silvas but we have yet to put anything on it.  No tree skirt.  No lights.  No ornaments.  No star.  Ha ha!  We wanted to wait until Laurie brought Andrew's ornaments down from Washington but her trip keeps getting delayed due to weather.  But, we have a tree and it's our first Christmas tree.

5. Watch "White Christmas"
"White Christmas" is my favorite holiday movie to watch.  I love it.  Every thing about it.  Andrew and I cuddled up with warm mugs of hot cocoa and settled in to spend a lazy Sunday evening watching this classic.

6.  Send out Christmas cards 
We also got our Christmas cards printed up.  We didn't get too fancy this year.  But we got them out!  We sent out 225 cards which seems like a lot to me for our first year of marriage.  We feel so blessed to have so many dear friends and members of our family, though.  And I have loved getting cards in return!

 Sherry Ward took our photos this year.  This is the third time we have used her and we love her!  We highly recommend her.  She is so professional and prompt in getting your edited photos back to you.  Here are some of our favorite photos that we didn't include:

 
7.  Look at Christmas lights
 Saturday night,  after dinner with the Silvas, we drove down to Spanish Fork to see the "Festival of Lights."  It was only $7 a car and they have a cute drive around the golf course with holiday music.  I found a scavenger hunt for Christmas lights on Pinterest that was super cute.  Unfortunately, they didn't have a lot of "traditional" holiday displays at this particular venue.  However, if you were looking for a Santasaurus, look no further, folks!  There was also a bunch of Olympic sports represented and a festive, erupting volcano.  Quite the menagerie!

We have been finding more holiday movies to watch.  Our personal collection is rather dismal so we have renting movies on Amazon Instant Video or borrowing from friends.  We watched "Elf" and "Home Alone" this weekend.