Packing up Christmas Decor

We did the New Year clean-up before Jason headed back to work. I sure did leave all those cozy christmas decorations up as long as I could and I think that we all wanted to leave them up just a little bit longer. It was fun to take talk about our favorite parts of the holiday while we took the decor down. Unanimously, everyone's favorite part was the time together. It's things like that that really help me to remember where the priorities really need to be, especially come the holiday seasons.

And then there are the traditions that we always look forward to. This last year I decided to alter our yearly Christmas decoration a little bit. We have typically purchased a new one at a store where we were living at the time. As a result we have some ornaments on our tree from several different cities. This year, however, I felt like it wasn't representing our family as I would like it to. I wanted something a little more memory rich and so I pieced together a few different ideas and came up with the idea of our family pyjama picture from Christmas Eve going in a clear ornament with some key words summarizing our previous year in the back.

It was an instant hit. The kids showed it to everyone that they could. A definite memory maker and memory keeper. Kind of like a little time capsule. Would like to repeat next year.

We also did handprint ornaments for the kids. Definitely a priceless keepsake, though not one I think we will repeat every year. So happy that I took the time to track down the clay to make them though. I'm sure the day will come (far sooner than it feels like now) when those little handprints seem like a distant memory. In truth, if I think about that too much, it makes me pretty teary eyed. I know the future will be great in it's own way, but I prefer to keep focused on making the best of the present while facing the future.

To keep the clean up fun, we enjoyed goofing around a little. We set out the challenge to see all the things we could pretend our tree skirt to be. Milayla was too timid to give it a go so you can see what she helped us come up with.

It was a fun day while still being appropriately reflective. If that makes any sense at all.