Getting Ready for Christmas

We are anticipating Christmas and making preparations.  Liam is so excited about Christmas this year.  He loves Christmas trees and decorations.  Every time he looks at our tree in the living room he says, "Aw, it's perfect."  Amazing and perfect are his two favorite words right now.  Liam has his own tree in his room.  He picked out the red ornaments at the store and helped decorate the tree.  He is very proud.

We have some family traditions.  Every night after dinner we do our advent devotions.  Liam is in charge of putting an ornament on our advent tree banner.  Each ornament goes with the devotion for the evening.  He also puts a character on the nativity banner.  He blows out the candles on the advent wreath.  We keep explaining to him that he will have to share these responsibilities with his sister next Christmas.

I do almost all my Christmas baking with my mom and sister-in-law, Anna.  However, this year I decided that Liam was old enough to help with sugar cookies.  He loves to help me bake, so I knew he would do great.  He was such a big helper!  I think the cookies turned out really well. We cut out and baked the cookies in the morning, took a break for lunch and to play in the snow, and then decorated them in the afternoon.

Today, we had our first snowfall of the season.  It was a light dusting, but Liam has been anxious to try out his new snow gear.  We had fun playing in the little bit of snow that was in our yard.  Daisy was not amused with the weather.

I love witnessing the awe of Christmas through the eyes of a two year old.  Everything is so magical for him.  My favorite part is hearing Liam say, "On Christmas we have a birthday party for Jesus."  My prayer is that we always keep that the center of our Christmas season.