All tagged Christmas
Unicorn, our Elf on the Shelf, came back for a second year. She made her appearance on December 1st and went back home to the North Pole on December 24th. This was such a good year as far as Melody’s Christmas spirit. She was so into Christmas in general, and was obsessed with Unicorn even more this year. Check out her shenanigans below!
How has Christmas already happened, and we are now in 2023?!?!? This year really flew by quickly. And I even felt like the Christmas season happened in the blink of an eye. Brad was off work the entire month, but with Melody still in school, the time passed so quickly. We had a lot of fun this holiday season, and thankfully we stayed out of the ER!
Merry Christmas! I thought today would be a perfect day to share Melody’s Santa pictures from this year. She actually had two sets made.
Last weekend, we went to Memphis to go to Breakfast with Santa at my in-law’s country club. This is something we do most years since we had Melody. This is sort of like a kick off to Christmas every year. All the girls are old enough to not be too afraid of Santa and enjoy it. The youngest wasn’t afraid, but she just did not want her picture taken, ha. She even pretended to be asleep in one of the pictures!
I told myself over the last few years we would never get one of those elves. It was too much work and I was not a fan. But I gave in very last minute this year. Literally I found an elf at Target that was a girl with blue eyes on December 1st. I actually ended up having a lot of fun with our elf. There were a few days she was forgotten by me, but thankfully Brad would remember. She was touched, but we recovered. Check out her shenanigans below.
Christmas is always so much fun. It can be so magical to see it all through Melody’s eyes. Now it can also be super stressful. This year I made sure to finish my Christmas shopping before Thanksgiving. Most was done before November. We also cut back on our traveling this year because we wanted some time at home because Brad’s work travel will pick by up in 2022. But we kept busy, and I decided to just throw all of the fun in one post!
About two weeks ago, we visited Santa. Melody was nervous but also so excited. Kindergarten has really brought out the bravery in Melody. My aunt got some great pictures of Melody with Santa. And she even spoke with him for about ten minutes afterwards all about what she wanted and his favorite cookies and candy.
With 2020 being such a depressing year, we started decorating for Christmas as soon as Halloween was over. We tried to decorate as much as we could and enjoy it all as long as possible. Even though COVID has happened, we still managed to stay busy this holiday season. Follow along below!
This year I opted for a less “handmade” teacher fits for Melody’s dance and preschool teachers. As you may know, I have become obsessed with Simplified over the last year or so. I bought a bunch of cute Simplified products when I bought my 2020-2021 planner in April earlier this year.
I love decorating for Christmas. Last year I even was able to buy my dream 12 foot tree for our foyer on clearance after Christmas. So today I wanted to share all of our decor this year! Next year we will need to add some new things as well as replace some of our current things (more on that below).
We recently celebrated Christmas with Emily, Justin, and their little ones last weekend. I hosted this year, and I wanted to make it fancy-ish. We decided to do breakfast for dinner (which was fun and different), and I made his place setting as cute as I could without getting out the fine china plates and silverware (I did use our fine china glasses). Well I also decided to make some cute and easy place card holders. They are super easy and cheap too!
While in Food Therapy last week, our therapist suggested we make Christmas tree ice cream cones as a sort of food play. Melody hates getting things on her fingers, so it will help with her playing with the icing. I made one too, and we will probably make more this week. They turned out cute, so I thought I would share.
This year we still decided to meet Santa. My aunt is a photographer, so we at least kept away from the mall version, ha. Melody was still a bit hesitant and didn’t want to talk to him. She even had a few moments that she almost cried. But we still managed to get a few cute pictures.
Back in November, we attended the walking nights at Galaxy of Lights. Based on what I had read, we thought it would be a COVID friendly outdoor Christmas event. And while a good portion of the event was COVID friendly because it was outside and *most* people spaced out, there were parts of the event that were poorly managed and felt very unsafe. We tried to be cautious during those moments though. Melody has not stopped talking about those lights either.
We had such a great Christmas this year. It was our very first Christmas in our new home. I love getting to make new memories here. It really makes it feel more like home as we continue to live here. This was also the first year Melody actually understood and liked Santa. No tears this year!! We also did a lot of traveling and visiting family, and we continued a lot of our traditions from years’ past.
Christmas is so special now that we have Melody in our lives. And now that is she getting older, she is able to understand more about everything that revolves around Christmas. And we are still as busy as every during the holidays.
For this year’s trip to Opryland, we wanted to go back at Christmastime. Last year we visited in the summer, and while it was far less crowded, it wasn’t as festive. They did have events going on, but nothing can compare to Opryland at Christmas. We loved our visit in 2016 at Christmas, so we decided to do it again!
This is Melody’s first year in dance. And since Christmas is during the dance year, I wanted to do a small gift for her teachers. She has one teacher and two assistants. For Christmas, I decided to get them all the same gift. One of the assistants is a boy, so I had to keep that in mind when deciding on a gift to give. I also wanted something that representing dance in some way. This made things really difficult. But I fell back to a super easy gift of chocolate. Chocolate works for all genders and most people like it. So I knew I wanted to do something like that. I had found some cute ideas with mason jars that made the jar look like a reindeer. Well that was a bit too much work for me. So instead, I played off the idea of mason jars, and I decided to decorate them with vinyl using my Silhouette Cameo. See how I did it below (oh, and this could easily be done without a Silhouette!).
I have been trying to do more crafts with Melody on the days we are at home and not involved in preschool or dance. One of the Christmas crafts I wanted to do was a felt tree. I liked this idea because she could move the ornaments around all season if she wanted since no glue is involved. She had a lot of fun making it and was super proud of the results!
