Christmas Beginnings

I know, I know, I am way behind as usual.  We have been enjoying the Christmas season for about a month now, and I have not posted about any of it.  I will get caught up.  My OCD will just not allow me to not finish my posts about 2015 before it is over.  Ha!  This year, we started the festivities pretty early in November with a little tree lighting celebration in our new town.  This one was a special "tree" of lights set up in one of the main shopping centers in town.  We don't have an indoor mall in our town so this is the next best thing.  It was a nice night to be outdoors.  We missed the actual lighting, but we got some pictures of the tree and other festivities.

Our family with the Holly Springs Towne Center tree of lights.  I think Baby Mattox enjoyed seeing his first Christmas tree. 

The big boys enjoyed playing some games.  They both did a good job throwing the football to the football player.  Future quarterbacks perhaps?  Throwing the rubber chickens at the Chicken Wing Fling was the best though.  Haha! 

Instead of spending our day after Thanksgiving doing the Black Friday shopping madness, we usually go and pick out our tree and decorate that day.  Well, the decorating usually takes most of the weekend.  We really didn't decorate too much this year, but I love our simple and festive little Christmas home.  We did find a nice little tree farm that I think we will use in the future.  We have one across the road from our neighborhood, but they got their trees over a week before Thanksgiving and did not put them in water so we knew they would not last as long.  We went to a fun little farm between Cary and Morrisville with decent prices.  Although it didn't have all the extras that our old Charlotte tree farm had, it did have some nice photo worthy spots.  We also think we will visit this farm next Fall for their corn maze.

We loved this huge rocking chair at Phillips Farms.  I see a new traditional annual picture here.  The sun was just very very bright that day.  

We found our perfect tree.   I think it is the one behind Eddie and the boys.  

I didn't take nearly as many pictures this year sadly.  I don't know what was wrong with me.  I can blame the too bright sun since the boys didn't want to cooperate for many.  Brody did let me take his picture with the trees, and he loved watching them net our tree. 

And of course, they found a tractor.  Whew, thank goodness for that.  I don't know what I would do without our annual tractor pictures at the tree farm.  Ha! 

Evan's last day of school before winter break was Friday, December 4th.  He will be out of school until January 4th so we have been enjoying having him home.  Since he would not be in school for most of the Christmas season, I had to get his teacher gifts ready very early this year.  We went with the sugar scrub idea we had used in the past.  It smelled so good!

Cinnamon & vanilla...yum!  I made the little labels myself and used these little red jars from Target.  They were three for $3 in the cheap bins.  

Stay tuned for more Christmas festivities...