O Christmas Tree

This Saturday morning, we ventured out to pick up a few essentials, the most important being our Christmas tree. We were planning on buying a small real tree so that we wouldn't have to store it but our apartment complex doesn't allow real trees so we had to buy a fake one. With the budget being tight we were worried what we would be able to find. Luckily Wal-Mart had display trees 50% off so we got our little beauty for $12! I absolutely love it and am so excited to have a tree in our home!Morgan is getting to be just the right age for Christmas. He is starting to catch on to the different traditions of the season and is getting really excited. He loved helping us carry the tree into the house and decorating it. He got so excited about every ornament and all the fun lights. Cody and I were laughing and smiling the whole time.

Here's a video of Morgan's first tree decorating experience:

Pepper helped by sleeping through most of it and then hanging out in her jumpy seat while we finished up. What a trooper!

Here's some snapshots from around the apartment. We have limited decorations but build up our supply each year after the holidays when everything goes on sale.

Florida Snow-people

The Willow Tree figurines wanted to help celebrate baby Jesus' birth also.

This corner of my home makes me SO happy!

Last Tuesday night my enrichment committee and I put on a Relief Society Christmas dinner and program. Our theme was "Feeling the Spirit of Christ in the Season."

My friend Heather made those awesome Christmas tree cake bites. Such skills!

We all brought our kids to church all day on Tuesday and decorated the entire gym in two sections. The one side had all the tables for dinner and then we had dividers up to hide the other side of the gym, which we made into a living-room.

Jen M., Jen A. and Julie

Julie, Laura and Heidi

These lovely men, along with a few others, volunteered to serve us all night. They were wonderful and even started cleaning everything up while we had our program. We had a bunch of other men volunteer to be our nursery leaders for the night so all the women would be free to participate. We had almost 90 women come and around 35 children in the nursery!

After dinner, we invited the women to move over into the living-room area where we had hot chocolate and hot cider waiting for them, along with cookies and peppermint sticks. It was magical and very cozy.

My lovely and talented friend Becky was my hero for the night. She bought all the food, prepared most of it, directed everyone else in serving it and stayed in the kitchen through the whole dinner. Then she played the piano for our program. We had a beautiful musical number by two sisters, I read "A Christmas Dress for Ellen" by Thomas S. Monson, Becky then read some quotes from Pres. Monson's Christmas devotional and bore her testimony, we sang a carol, I read a portion of the Christmas story from Luke and then we sang two more carols. The entire evening was perfect from beginning to end. The spirit was so strong and we felt so much love for each other and the Christmas season. Even though I was technically in charge of the evening, I take no credit for the wonderful time had by all.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who participated.

I love Christmas!