The Rollins Family: Putting up the Christmas tree..and making candy

Friday, December 21, 2012

Putting up the Christmas tree..and making candy

I was talking to my mom about a month before Christmas and she was asking if we'd want a nice new Christmas tree from them for Christmas. My first thought was "that would be awesome!" because our tree is certainly not anything to be desired. Honestly, I think we bought it from Target or somewhere, I can't even remember the price and we've had it for most of our marriage. It certainly would be nice to have a beautiful Christmas tree. BUT then I remembered Christmas the year before and thought otherwise. Ya see, my girls just love Christmas and love the tree and love "helping" mom decorate. I think that three or four ornaments were broken and the tree changed daily because they loved moving the ornaments all around. And ya know what, in my mind, that's how it should be. I want my girls to love decorating the tree and have memories of doing so that they can remember forever. I don't want our Christmas tree to be something that could only be looked at, because mommy was too stressed out that they would break or ruin something if they got near it. So, I told my mom that as much as I would like a new Christmas tree, I think I'll wait a few years until my kids are a little older (or until our basement is finished and I can have two ;)) so that they can still enjoy decorating our tree. Christmas is for fun and for the kids anyway, so might as well enjoy it, right?

So the weekend after Thanksgiving we got out the tree and the decorating began. Well, kind of..there was of course, a lot of playing going on as well. Here's Aivree in the tree box

I set the tree up, put the ribbon on and sat back and let them do their thing

They loved it

Don't you love Aivree's enthusiasm in this picture?

This was our first, and definitely not only, casualty of the Christamas decorations this year. There's usually a couple each year (see why it's a good thing that I don't have expensive, beautiful decor?)

Here's some of the rest of the decor in our house

I honestly couldn't remember how I had decorated the year before, so I'm sure it looks very different, but I'm okay with that. I know the Nativity was the same. And this is the one Christmas decoration I have that truly does matter to me. This does give me some anxiety when the girls go near it, but I'm glad it's the only thing that does. They know how special it is and although Aivree still likes to test the boundaries, it's still all in tact.

We also decorated with our artwork again.

and we displayed our Christmas drawings in the shape of a Christmas tree :)

It's feeling a lot like Christmas around here!

A new thing my mom decided to do this year was to have a candy making night! She planned it all out and we all arrived ready to help and work in whatever way we could. We made caramels, english toffee, peanut brittle, melt in your mouth buttermints, nut clusters, almond joys/mounds, and divinity! It was A LOT of candy making, but it was so much fun! Even wrapping all those caramels didn't feel like such a daunting task since there were so many of us to help. And it was all so so yummy. It was all divided up so we were all able to take some home and do with it what we pleased. I handed some out to neighbors and we also enjoyed a lot of it. I seriously loved it and am looking forward to doing it again next year.
Kina making toffee. I love her face in this. ;) It turned out perfect