Christmas Happies

Happy Tuesday! It’s TWO days until Christmas!! This Christmas season has flown by (as it always does), so I’m soaking up the last couple of days watching all of the Christmas movies and listening to all of the Christmas music and doing anything Christmasy I can 🙂

Today I wanted to share a couple of things we’ve done this Christmas season that’s made me happy!

Our town’s annual Christmas parade is always a highlight. I have such fond memories of going for as long as I can remember–and I was even in the parade one year! This year we met up with my mom, my sister and her family, and my BIL and SIL and all watched the parade together. Fun fact: Growing up, my grandfather owned a butcher shop downtown and he used to park his truck right in front of his shop, and my sister and I and our cousins would get to be in the back of his truck and watch the parade go by right in front of us. It was always so much fun!

I find so much joy in dressing my kids, and I love a reason to dress them for a theme. I LOVE dressing them for the Christmas season, and I’ve really enjoyed putting their outfits together each Sunday morning. (Merritt has ornaments on her dress and Banks has holly embroidered on his top)

Each year, our church has Nine Lessons and Carols on a Sunday evening. Using Scripture, we go through the story of creation, the fall, and redemption and each reading is interspersed with a song–usually a carol. We always end in candlelight. This was also the first year the babies joined us in the service and it went so much better than I expected! They did really well and even had electric candles for their use during the candlelight time.

A really fun thing about having school-aged children is having class Christmas parties to attend! Harrison’s was lots of fun this year and my mom was even able to go!

We recently did our Shaneyfelt Christmas Light Drive By this year. We wore our Christmas jammies and grabbed a treat from Starbucks and drove around looking at Christmas lights. When I was little, we did this every Christmas night, but now we do this before Christmas.

I found this memory the other day!!!

We always go to Polar Express day at the library and visit Santa. This year we learned that Merritt does not like Santa–along with all of the characters at Disney, firetrucks, and heights LOL

We also went and walked through the Galaxy of Lights in Huntsville again this year. This has been such a fun tradition, and it’s even sweeter now that we have kids. It took us an hour to walk through and then the babies slept the whole way home while Dustin and I sang to Christmas music 🙂

Today we plan on staying home and watching ALL THE CHRISTMAS MOVIES before we have our first family Christmas gathering tomorrow night. Merry Christmas!!