Christmas Traditions

For Family Home Evening last night Joe and I made gingerbread houses. We've come a little ways from the ghetto graham cracker ones we made the first year we were married. Last year I was stupid enough to think it would be easy to bake everything from scratch. It wasn't hard, but it sure was time consuming. I decided this year that the store-bought kits would be a lot betterm and they certainly were! While it's a very time-consuming project, it's super fun and part of our family traditions. Can I even call it a tradition if we've only done it three years? I don't really know the qualifications of a "tradition," but I'm going to give it that label anyhow!

Here's Joe's house...Who knew he was so talented at making candy houses?!

Here's mine...That little brick road took forever and
I couldn't have done it without the help of tweezers :)
But it sure is cute.

In the back, we have Adam and Eve sunbathing in the candy garden
Around the painters tape pool. Now, if that's not paradise, I don't know what is!

And here are the houses together.

Another one of our traditions is to make new ornaments for our Christmas tree each year. It sounds like a pain, and sometimes it is..but it's a lot of fun too. Here's our tree this year. You can't really see the detail work on the snowflakes, but there's glitter and buttons and a little blue paint outlining the flakes.

And finally, here's our front porch decorated with lights. We put these up last night too. Joe is such a grinch about so many things. I had a couple of strands of lights that were pretty long. I started to put them up a few minutes before he got home. When he got home and saw what I was doing, he kinda just starred at the lights for a bit. Once he started to help, he asked, "What do we need so many lights for?" I knew why he was asking, but just for a kick I said back, "Why are you asking? Is it because you think it's too many for the space we're putting them or because you're a stingy grinch?" Of course it was the latter! He definitely is not the kind of person who gets wrapped up in the traditions of holidays. If it were up to him, December would just be a regular month with a couple of days with PTO. It's the PTO that he gets really excited about when there's a holiday coming.