Preperations for Christmas

We have a couple of family traditions we like to do to help celebrate the coming of the Christmas holiday. We have also found that it helps the kids with the whole anticipation problem so we don't hear "is it almost Christmas yet?" every thirty seconds. We did our annual wagon ride through the lights at Thanksgiving Point. We really enjoy this activity. The kids get to see all the lights and also get to experience a "sleigh" ride kind of feel to it. Sometime, like this year, the other people on the wagon with start singing Christmas carols and everyone has a great time. We dress the kids up in their winter clothes and set off in the cold to freeze our butts off. Jaycie this year was so excited about all the lights. Every time we passed any we would hear "Look Christmas Lights" at the top of her lungs. She made every car ride and the wagon ride really enjoyable. We really enjoy it. It is a great way to start of the holiday season.
On Christmas eve we always make a batch of "Santa" sugar cookies. All the kids really get a kick out of this. This year it was a competition to see who made the best cookie for Santa. Jaycie decorated one cookie. Then quickly ate it clean and redecorated it at least 5 times. We made sure Santa or anyone else was to eat that cookie. Chesney quickly learned that decorating with colorful sugar was fun. She made a cookie that had 1 inch of red sugar on top of it. Mom had to dump most of it back into the container just to move the cookie onto the cookie sheet with the rest of the finished cookies. Laine and Kaylee decided it would be fun to see if they could get each one to mess up their cookies. Everyone had a great time!