It's Christmastime!

Our house is ready for Christmas! We usually decorate the week before Thanksgiving, but this year we have been remodeling our kitchen, so that put us a little behind. We were in Ft. Worth the week of Thanksgiving, but when we got back we finished up the next stage of the remodel and then got our decorations up...still before December even started. :)

Our Christmas tree! We changed out our topper this year and added some candycane ribbon. I love it!

 Cooper's room: her tree and Christmas books. Kendall helped her decorate her tree.

 Kendall's room: Precious Moments and Jim Shore nativities,

 her tree that she decorated all by herself,

and her Christmas books and stuffed animals. The girls had fun decorating their rooms!

Lots of our nativities from all over the world are in the guest bathroom:

This one is from Kenya, made of banana leaves:

 and we got this one in Mexico on a cruise several years ago. We love baby Jesus in the hammock and the wise men are packing heat. :)

In the kitchen we have our four favorite nativities from our partner countries that our church works with:

 We are doing advent for the first time this year with the girls. It has been really neat so far - we're doing it Dane-style, so making it work for us with Kendall the age that she is. Each night at dinner we light the candle that we are on for the week (so far just the Hope candle has been lit because we're a little behind), we talk about how Jesus is our Hope and about waiting for his birth at Christmas, we practice our verse that we are memorizing - Luke 2:10, and we pray. After dinner we let Kendall do a page in the sticker book you can see in the above picture. She is doing really well with it and we are enjoying doing this as a family!

Our mantle with all four stockings!

This is just the most fun time of year and we love decorating the house for Christmas!