'Tis the Season

This is our first December in Indy, and so it's our first Jolly Days at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. We went down to the museum on Black Friday to see Santa's big arrival, and got our first taste of the Yule slide, as well as our first taste of the new Gingerbread cafe. Mmmm, gingerbread....

I'm going to be honest with you, the cookies are my favorite part of every Christmas season.

Like many homes, December is full of traditions in our house. We like to kick off the holiday season by decorating our Christmas tree near the beginning of the month, and it just doesn't feel like the holidays until we have Christmas cookies to munch while we hang ornaments and listen to Bing Crosby, Burl Ives, and Nat King Cole sing our favorites. In fact, Bing and Bowie are singing their Drummer Boy duet as I type.

This year, Godzilla helped set up the tree. He's at that age where he's just enough help to be adorable while not being a hindrance to the process. We go with a fake tree for many reasons, so he got to help fluff the branches first, then took lessons in winding the lights up and around our tannenbaum. After fighting to find enough working strands of lights to fill the tree, it was ready for to get the full Christmas treatment, but as there are five of us, and Kate and I each work, time is limited. So we put off the day of decorating until the next weekend, when we could do the cookies and cocoa and carols.

When we finally got to tree day, everything just fell into place. Our tree gets filled with an eclectic collection of ornaments from Kate's and my childhoods all the way up through today. Much of our tree is covered in paper crafts made in school, and then the kids get an ornament to reflect their interests of the past year each Christmas from us as well as from their grandparents, and so our tree is something of a time capsule looking back over every stage of our lives. From my school days, through our days as newlyweds, to E's infatuation with superheros, you can find a slice of it on our tree. Needless to say, we will never have that "perfect" tree.

Everyone gets involved as we each take our own ornaments out of their protective boxes and find just the perfect places on the tree for each one. We relive the memories from each ornament as we munch on our cookies and sing along with Ella. It really is a magical time.

The cookies though? Now that takes some inspiration!