Imagine Christmas Wishes Shooting Out of Your Eyes

Since the Christmas stations on the radio aren't playing any good Christmas music I had to turn on my Mairah Carey holiday Pandora station today. I normally hate it when Christmas starts before Halloween and can be found in a Grinch mood until the Thanksgiving left-overs are just a memory.

This year, I am not ashamed to be in the Christmas spirit a little early. 

We have been so behind on all the other holidays this year and Halloween a bit of a let down for me. We didn't carve pumpkins, make costumes or do anything very festive. We did get to watch a Halloween parade in a neighboring town which was pretty cool but I felt like Halloween crept up so quickly and then was gone way too fast!

We are going to Flagstaff for Thanksgiving and don't really have much else to do to prepare for that except find some bow hunting gear (more on that later). We will probably help with some of the food prep once we get to AZ but mostly we get to love on our adorable nieces and nephew for the whole week.

I can't wait to see these sweet things at Thanksgiving!

The AZ Reeds added one more niece to the bunch and moved from NYC
to Flagstaff since we saw them in May

With Thanksgiving plans all taken care of I will gladly take a few extra weeks to get excited for Christmas. 

Last year's Christmas made us realize that we wanted to start some of our own family traditions and change the way we do Christmas. Don't get me wrong, we loved seeing family and enjoyed the opportunity to think about others as we picked out gifts. We loved being on the receiving end of some great presents as well. But in the end there was just something missing. There wasn't quite as much magic. Maybe we're getting older, maybe the traveling was stressful and tiring or maybe we just lost sight of what it's really all about. 

So, this year I dreamed up a theme to hopefully inject some of the Christmas magic back into our holiday season.

Meaningful Memories Christmas will be focused on our Savior first and foremost. It will also include some of our favorite traditions, serving others and decorating the heck out of our house!

It will mean no money budgeted towards presents for each other. Gifts for family and close friends will be a little more meaningful, something that took some time and creativity on our part and less clicking on Amazon wish lists. I want to make pineapple filled cookies and feel the adrenaline pump as I run to someone's doorstep and leave a Secret Santa bundle. I want to have a fancy, candle-lit Christmas Eve dinner and read the story of our Savior's birth. I want to pull out all of the ornaments we've collected over the past few years and reminisce about the adventures we've had traveling around the country as we put them on a real pine tree. I want to watch Elf, It's A Wonderful Life, Home Alone, A Christmas Story and Christmas in Connecticut too.

If it were completely up to me our house would look like this:

I don't know if I can get the Dr. to put up this many lights.
We may have to work up to this over the next few years.

Regardless of how many lights we put on our house or how fancy our food is, I am going to try my best to make this a meaningful Christmas filled will magic and a lot of great memories.