CHRISTMAS 2018
It is absolutely crazy that I am writing our Christmas blog when I feel that I just started sharing about our holiday calendar. We had a wonderful Christmas! If you follow me on social media then I’m sure you know of some of the fun we had, but I kept a lot of our moments for the blog. Here’s a peek into our December!
We set up all our decorations the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Once Thanksgiving is here, we are in the festive mood!
In addition to our family holiday calendar, we incorporated an advent calendar as well as a wreath this year.
December 1 means the Wiginton family holiday calendar is here! Milani got to open up card #1! Our day one was spent with family and ended with a movie in our hometown to watch the new Grinch movie! We L O V E D it!
We have a holiday puzzle every year. My husband has memories of doing puzzles with his Dad growing up and we want to incorporate this memory with him and his kids. We did decide that 1000 is too many pieces for all the activities we do. Next year we plan to downsize to 500.
Movie nights are pretty much 70% of our holiday calendar lol. We love love love Christmas movies! Here are our favorites.
Every year we have a reindeer day! This year we had “Reindeer Floats”, reindeer cookies, reindeer crafts, made reindeer food and of course did all this while watching “Prancer”. It’s one of our favorite days!
We love Grinch Night!
We were thrilled that Uncle Mark flew in for eleven days from Montana to spend Christmas with us all! So thankful!
First time making gingerbread cookies was a success! They were absolutely delicious and not hard to make at all.
The next cookie we attempted was a homemade sugar cookie with my favorite cream cheese frosting. YUM-O!
Recipes:
Sugar Cookies
Cream Cheese frosting (from my cinnamon roll recipe)
Have you seen those paint and sip parties people attend? Well, I went to one finally for the first time and had such a great time!
When I came home and my family oohed and awwed over my painting it triggered an idea to create my own paint party on our holiday calendar! I chose a gingerbread house template and we had so much fun! Alexa played Christmas music from the 1940’s all night while we laughed, concentrated, ate snacks and giggled over efforts. All in all, we WILL be doing this next year!
This is pretty much the only picture I snapped on Christmas since I cooked a massive meal for my entire family! I opted to set my phone down and just enjoy the day. Santa came. Family traveled safely. Our bellies were full (very full) and our hearts were filled with love. Very thankful.
We had a blizzard come in late Wednesday night, so when we woke up on December 27 we had zero power and it was a full-on blizzard. We made coffee on the stove (thanks to camping equipment) and enjoyed some doggie snuggles in our comfy chairs trying to stay warm. I did fall asleep around 7am while my husband was reading in Jeremiah and it was the best ever. Something about a blizzard and being home bound with my favorites…it is well with my soul.
On New Years Eve Eve we told my brother goodbye before he flew back to Montana. We always love having him home and sure wish he could be local again, but his heart is in Montana.
I am still in shock that the holidays are over, but since we celebrate December every single day, once Christmas is over we are happy to move onto the new year. Another year we are humbled by the greatness of our God and that He chose to send His son for us….us. We are so unworthy of a Savior, but my goodness are we thankful that God became Man on the earth for us. We pray that you all had a great 2018 and we are praying and believing that 2019 will be our best yet.
After I finish the bits and pieces of this blog, I will move onto finalizing our New Year’s Eve activities for tomorrow. If you haven’t read why we do what we do for New Year’s Eve, you should!
Happy New Year to you all! I’m thankful for all of you that take the time to read what I have to say.
xoxo
hatt
