Merry Christmas!!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas today! Christmas is most definitely my favorite holiday of the year. Not only is important to me to celebrate the birth of Christ, but I also LOVE giving presents. I love to watch my friends and family open their gifts and see the looks (hopefully happy ones) on their faces. Christmas shopping is always fun for me because I love to browse until I find that special something that I think my friend or family member might enjoy or need, which Chad absolutely hates because he is definitely a buyer and not a browser. It is a challenge not to resort to gift certificates (except in the case of Chad's little brother Jonathan, for whom it's kind of a tradition for us to get a Target gift card), but hopefully our friends and family appreciate the extra time and thought we put into their gifts each year. Of course, that might just be wishful thinking--maybe they all really would prefer a Target gift card!

Whether you got everything on your wish list or not, I hope you had a wonderful day with family and loved ones. Consider this reproduction of our Christmas card your official Christmas greeting if you didn't already receive one from us in the mail.



As you can probably tell, our Christmas cards are homemade, which is one of the reasons we don't send out as many as we probably should each year! Making our own cards is another very time consuming tradition that I started many years ago and just can't seem to break the habit of. Some years they aren't very elaborate, but this year I had the urge to do something a little more creative. I think they turned out kind of cute, although I had to actually take a day off work to get them finished. Why I can't seem to actually get them started before December 15, I'll never know. I'm not sure what my problem is with regard to procrastinating my Christmas cards. Every year I tell myself that I'm going to start the weekend of Thanksgiving, but I never actually do. I always tell myself that I can't send them too far in advance because a) I don't want to write our Christmas letter prior to mid December because so many important things (like Chad's new job) seem to happen late in the year, and b) we traditionally take a family picture in front of the tree, which we never actually get up and decorated until about the second weekend of the month. So those are my excuses, which I guess I don't even really need because hopefully everyone's card should have arrived prior to December 25th!

Speaking of our family picture, you may have noticed that our goofy girl Hope has her eyes closed in this year's shot (you can see a more clear copy of the picture here). Our friend Quillen took about 10 pictures of the 4 of us and Hope had her eyes closed in about half of them! I could have probably photoshopped different eyeballs onto her face, but Chad and I decided that her squinted eyes really capture her weirdness better than normal eyes would! She's just a quirky girl and this is a good example of her quirkiness!

Anyway, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas day and a terrific celebration with friends and loved ones! As our friend Nolan texted us earlier today, "Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus!" :)