A Scrap of Life

I realize that it's March, but I never got around to posting Christmas photos because I was still working on Disneyworld pictures. But it's never too late for Christmas, right?

So, the day after we returned from Disney we slept in nice and late to help with the jet lag and then got up and went Christmas tree shopping. We quickly realized that most Christmas tree farms aren't open on Fridays, though we were lucky enough to find one open. We found this beautiful noble that we (ok, Brian did it all) cut down. The family hauled it out and we brought it home and decorated it. We set the camer up to take some pics in front the tree. We were lucky enough to get one with the dogs too.

The kids have put up this Santa sign each and every year since they were old enough to know about Santa. I'm amazed at how big the kids have gotten over the years and one day will gather all these Santa sign pictures side-by-side to compare. Here's this years pic. Aaaaahhhh... Christmas Eve. The anticipation grows and the kids are all excited for the coming day. The last thing before PJ's on Christmas Eve is the reading of "Twas the Night Before Christmas." This year it was a new tradition again. We passed it along one person to the next each reading one page at a time from the book. It was a great way to share the tradition with the kids.
Our newest tradition is one that we picked up from Disneyworld. According to the story, German Americans took to hiding a pickle on their holiday tree. On Christmas morning the kids would all look for it and the first child to find it would get a special gift or privilege.

In our house we left the pickle out on the plate with cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer, hoping that Santa would know the tradition and would hide the pickle for us. He did hide it, though the kids didn't remember first thing in the morning. They were too excited opening up their stockings and checking out their gifts from Santa. When we reminded them that there was something they were missing, they frantically started looking for the pickle. Santa hid it very hard this year, but it was finally found by Tristan who won the privlege to be the first to open a gift this year.

This is the kids on Christmas morning, all smiles and cheesing it up so they could open more gifts! LOL

Here's Carissa with a gift that she got from Tristan. The bottom one is the Webkinz guinea pig she got from Tristan which actually looks quite similar to the top one, here real guinea pig, Koda.

These were a gift that came on Christmas Eve in the kids advent calendar. They are plastic bubbles... the kind that I remember playing with as a kid. They come in the same little foil tubes with a tiny straw. They even smell the same plasticy smell that they did when I was a child. To use them you put little balls of the plastic gunk on the end of the straw then carefully blow. The kids got some rather big ones and had a great time doing it!

Somewhere along the line we got some snow in Scappoose. Not much to speak of this year, just a little here and there. Nothing too great or that lasted too long, but we did take the dogs out and Tucker had a lot of fun chasing and chewing on his tennis ball in the snow.