I have one or two things left to do before I am ready for Christmas!  All of the gifts are here and ready except one thing that I just have to finish up.  I have been caught up with trying to find gifts and getting the tree and decorating, but now I am going to try to focus on teaching Nathan why we celebrate Christmas.  I'm afraid he has been caught up in the excitement of cookies and lights and trees and decorations, too.  That is fine, but I want him to know the real reason for Christmas.  As I am trying to come up with traditions for us to celebrate as a family, there is one that I am going to take from my mom and that is reading the Christmas passages from the Bible on Christmas Eve.  It seems so strange trying to come up with our own traditions when I still feel like a kid myself at Christmas.  It seems so strange having kids at all when I sometimes still feel like a kid inside.  Funny how I used to think there was some kind of finite line where you suddenly grew up and felt like an adult.  Turns out I usually still feel like a kid, only I have adult responsibilities now.  I guess that's why some people always say they still feel like a kid inside, even when they grow old. 

The Winter Solstice has passed!  We are officially on our way to more daylight!  That is a pretty big thing up here.  Right now the sun is rising at 10:15 am and setting at 3:35 pm.  We have many months of cold, snow and darkness still ahead.  The darkness this winter is bearable, it's the darkness next winter that I dread.  It's nice to have Christmas lights up on the house outside.  It actually brightens the front yard so we can go out and do things in the snow in the afternoon and evening and still see.  We built a snow family the other day, I will have to take pictures and put them up on here.  Our snow piles at the sides of the driveway are beginning to get a bit unmanageable, really.  They look like the Chugach mountains, craggy and snowy and very, very tall!  Shoveling is really great exercise, though, and it's actually rather enjoyable to get outside and do some hard work.  I love yard work in the summer, so I guess shoveling is like winter yard work.  It's so much nicer to get a workout through manual labor than to go to the gym.  You don't even realize you are working out and you are accomplishing something immediately visible to boot.  

Here is a picture of our tree

I will try to get some more pictures on here soon.