I promise this will be short because Stella’s only 3 months old and at this point only cares about getting fed on a regular basis. She enjoys watching her parents make funny faces and noises in order to make her smile, but toys are lost on her at this point. So, of course, we bought her a fancy bouncy seat exerciser thing that she’s A) too small for and B) not terribly interested in it. But we’re confident that soon she’ll be able to get more use out of it.
When we lived in Utah my mom would draw a Christmas picture in our front window. I’m not sure if she did this every year or not, but I have enough memories of it to believe that she did. Or else it happened once and it was just so awesome that I add it into all of our Utah Christmases. My mom has boxes and boxes of Christmas decorations and I loved when everything came out. We had an advent calendar that my brother and I would fight over. It was nothing like the elaborate calendars today where you can open presents or do an activity. It was just a felt Christmas tree with velcro pieces that you put up each day and my brother and I loved it. There was a tiny ceramic Christmas tree with glowing lights. Two ceramic Santa boots that my mom would fill with M&Ms. Our stockings were just the basica Santa boot style with our names taped on in foil. Mine was the smallest and my dad’s was the biggest. I think we also had actual stockings that were filled at night, but I really only remember the tin-foil named ones. Our stockings were filled with nuts and oranges and maybe some chocolate, but not crazy gifts or dollar bills. Each Christmas we got a new ornament so that when we had our own tree as adults we’d be able to fully trim the tree (though I have yet to take any of these with me).
What I’m trying to say is that Christmas always felt like Christmas at my parents’ house. And I want that so much for my daughter. Obviously right now she doesn’t know the difference between Christmas and any other day, but I want her memories of the holidays to be as great as mine our.
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I scratched my cornea a couple of days ago, so no pictures and this is all I was able to get down before my eye started bothering me. So even though 2012 was the year I gave birth to the world’s most awesome baby, it’s also the year of the Morning Sickness that Lasted All Day and Didn’t End Until Five Months and the year that I scratched my eye. So I’m over it and ready for 2013.
I would paint a Santa in the front window every year that we were in Utah; I think I did it our first year in Idaho and then I thought you & Steve were too old — guess I should have checked with you.
You should have! I loved them!