Christmas 2010

This year our Christmas (with a tree, the decor, etc) was very last minute. And if it wasn't for Casey, I probably would have left the walls bare and promised to be more festive the following year. But I'm happy he's more sentimental than me and announced on 12/20 when we landed at the Austin airport, "tonight we're getting a tree!". So after stopping at Rudy's for dinner, we drove over to Walmart and bought the last tree anywhere in sight. In fact, we had actually left the store, resolved that all the trees were gone and then noticed one lonely tree standing outside. SOLD! For $17. Ironically my friend Katherine was leaving for Utah the next day and called me in the morning to see if we wanted her tree. But since it was 10 feet tall, it's a good thing we landed our little 6-footer.

So, we came home that night with our tree and before I even unpacked our bags, we pulled our 3 little boxes of decor from the garage and it began to look a lot like Christmas. Sorry if you've seen some of these on MADE but here's a glance at our Christmas-y house and our Christmas day happenings.
The kids loved, loved decorating the tree. In fact, it became an issue throughout week as Lucy kept saying "mom, that ornament needs to move over a bit" and continually rearranged them till a few broke. Next year, non-glass balls.
I was really happy though to see how excited they were about it all. This is the first year that they really "got" the fun of Christmas. Well, Lucy did and Owen just followed suit. He's such a cute shadow.
I hung super snowflakes again, this time on our freshly painted gray wall.
We had a few gifts under the tree.
The stockings were hung.
The tree came together with a hodge podge of ornaments and cheap last minute balls from Walmart.
We pulled out the cute jingle bell pillow (a gift from Casey's mom last year).
Our little nativity was well played with (a missing star on the stable, a missing arm and staff on the shepherd, and a slightly broken Mary.) We love it!
We hung the hand-painted nativity scene (another gift from Linda, along with the scene above and the blanket below. She's decorated our entire Christmas. Thank you Linda!)
My favorite addition this year was a discarded branch from the bottom of our tree. Lucy and I tied a bow on it and hung it up! I'm doing this every year.
and of course, I love a good wall of cute Christmas cards. Thank you for sharing your family updates with us!
With our house in a festive mood, we spent the remaining days leading up to Christmas by hanging out, buying last minute gifts, baking, and eating whatever we wanted. It's Christmas.
We spent Christmas Eve at my friend Tami's house with their family and other friends. She was so sweet to invite us over. Thank you Tami! We ate more yummy food, chit chatted, did a really (funny actually because there were 3 kids in it, playing multiple roles) nativity scene. We watched a beautifull video about Christ's life that Jared, Tami's brother-in-law, made (I need a copy for next year). The kids sang Christmas songs into the microphone (Lucy's dream), and then they all bounced on Casey's legs at the same time. This is the only photo I have from Christmas Eve. Funny.
By 9pm, we had kids in jammies, cookies out for Santa, and a very excited Lucy and Owen. In the morning, Lucy woke us up around 8:30 (perfect) and we headed out to see their goods.
Gifts and stocking, stuffed by Santa:
Lucy got some princess dresses and Owen got a really cool Airport set. For the past 8 months, he's been really into airplanes and since we've spent a lot of time in airports recently it was perfect. He played with this thing all morning long.
Both kids got Jessie and Woody talking dolls from my parents, which were a hit! Thank you Gram and Papa!
Lucy already had them in tucked into bed together....in a uh, non-weird way.
And from Casey's mom, Lucy got the most adorable set of handmade doll clothes! Linda and her friend spent an entire week making all of these (well, 3 sets of everything for 3 grand-daughters).
I love the little shoes (you can see more pics of all the clothing in my post here).
A cute girl and her cute dolls. Thanks Grandma!
Owen also got a really cool hand-crafted wooden shotgun from Casey's dad. This is the third year of cool wooden creations from him! I forgot to take photos but I'll be sharing it on MADE down the road.

For me I got (a really fun trip to Asia) and some new cooking items.
A dutch oven pot for making soups. I've been wanting one of these forever and the color is just perfect.
And this pretty stand caught my eye at Target months ago. I debated buying it and decided not too. Then I checked back at Christmas time and they were all gone. Then we happened to be at Target on Christmas Eve and they randomly had one left! And it was on sale! I definitely bought it. It'll make a lovely cupcake and cookie stand.
Casey got a variety of books, a miniature frying pan for cooking one egg, some bike trinkets, and the hit of the day for Casey and Lucy was the Presidents Puzzle. The two of them seriously did this thing 10 times over the Christmas holiday.
It was too advanced for her to do alone but she did pretty well in general.
And I know Casey loved hearing her say things like, "I think that piece goes here, next to Teddy."
She was also intrigued by which president was "her president" when she was born. And then asked each of us who our presidents were as well. Watching kids learn is really cool.
We spent the rest of our day doing whatever. We had the fake fire going on the TV.
We ate monkey bread,
(and picked at it all day long). Yummm.
We went to see Tangled (loved it!), I made a turkey that was ready for dinner at 9:30pm (whoops), and on Sunday we took an official family Christmas photo.
Merry Christmas from the Willards! And a Happy New Year!

And finally, I made these photo montages for our family newsletter but ended up not using them (and I already have a photo post in the works for our 2010 recap). So, I'll just post them here for my own amusement. Some pics from the year:
And some places we visited (from top, to bottom): Singapore, Bali, Italy, and Texas.