Front rooms are the perfect places for Christmas trees

Some of you VerWaynia readers weren't around for last year's holidays, but we spent them in an apartment and it was pretty lame! Our tree and all of our decorations were in storage while we were buying our house. Because of all of the craziness involved in purchasing a home, we didn't even get to do a lot of our Christmas traditions. This is the first holiday season in our house, and we're definitely making up for lost time!

I LOVE decorating for Christmas, and it's especially fun now that we have Evan to share it with - finally having the space to stretch out doesn't hurt either. We put up the tree and all of our indoor decorations last Sunday and it was so great to watch Evan's face light up every time I gave him a new ornament for the tree. I'm a huge fan of ornaments, and buy a few new ones each year during the after holiday sales. My favorite part of "putting up the tree" is looking at each one as I take them out of their box. Evan seems to share my fascination, and I'm loving it.

He was so cute! He ran as fast as he could back and forth between me setting out the ornaments, and Jeff running tree crowd control. And now, all he wants to talk about is the "risma" tree. He can't wait to see it when he comes downstairs in the morning.

We're also trying to balance all of the commercialism of Christmas by focusing on Advent and service. We started our Advent calendar on Monday. We've filled each day with a Bible passage and someone we can pray for as a family. Evan gets really excited after dinner when he knows it's time to open up a new door! We're doing the typical toy giveaway this year, but we've also been trying to find a service opportunity we can do as a family. I think we've decided spend some time caroling at my Grandma's nursing home. I know she will love that, but hopefully it's also one place that Evan's endless energy will be entertaining!