Christmas Traditions!

Christmas decorating came early at our house. We have had our decorations up for a couple of weeks YAY! One of our family's favorite traditions is the ornaments. Every year each child gets an ornament that represents their past year. This started the year our oldest was born with the "Santa holding the baby ornament" and goes on still. They start trying to guess their ornament weeks before they get them & I start shopping months before Thanksgiving (Thanks Ebay). After all of the decorations are up, we put up the tree. The last thing is the ornaments. We all sit and unwrap each year's ornament and talk about the memories that go along with them. This year Joel got his Temple ornament ( a beautiful coin of Jordan River Temple), his year of attending to do baptisms. Alec got his guitar, which snaps into a case when not in use. Sawyer's skateboarder is even wearing a red baseball cap! The Giselle ornament is now the largest on the tree. It can also be a tree topper, the picture hardly does it justice.

We love these ornament so much and carefully choose them each year. Some are custom made, like the monster in the leg cast for Joel (seriously this child can't stay out of a cast!), and the monster in the tent from camp for Alec- for his first year at camp. These monster's teeth and eyes all glow in the dark.

Savannah's looks a little like a Disney collection- hee hee.

Some of my favorites of Sawyer's are his piano from last year that he made us photograph the tiny music and blow it up so that he could play it -and- his "Horton the Elephant & baby elephant bird", to me this says everything about my boy,

"I meant what I said and I said what I meant. An elephant is faithful 100 percent".

We have an eagle for Alec from the year he achieved the rank of Eagle in Scouts and a sugar glider in a stocking for our animal loving Joel who couldn't forget our tiny pets.

As they grow up it occurs to me that they will take these ornaments to their homes and place them on their own trees. I will miss them, but I feel so blessed that they will have happy Christmas memories to take with them. Think of Savannah's poor hubby someday, with a tree full of Disney princesses and a huge Giselle on top! Oh it just makes me giggle! I pray that she will find a very special guy!