On December 1st, Veldor returned!!! Man, I cannot even tell you how much the kids love this elf and LOVE looking for him every morning!! Such an easy thing to bring them so much enjoyment (our elf only hides, doesn't do anything creative or mischievous). Dallin had been SOOOO excited for him to arrive and started counting down how many days were left before Veldor arrived, 2 or 3 weeks before December 1st. The first morning, he was hiding in the Christmas tree, like he does on December 1st every year. And I am proud of Veldor for not forgetting to move once since he has arrived- he has remembered 18 nights straight!
Nolan broke my beautiful Advent box, so this year I bought this type of Advent calendars for the kids. They loved them and they brought back fun memories for me since my mom bought these for us when we were little. Nolan loved his so much that on the 4th day or so, he opened all of his little doors and ate all of the chocolates out of them. I thought he'd be upset every day after that when Teya and Dallin opened each day of their calendar and ate a chocolate, or that he would sneak and get into theirs, but neither ever happened and he seemed to understand and accept the consequences of his actions.
Gingerbread House time! Once again, it was Dallin begging to decorate gingerbread houses, so we did this one last Sunday.
This is a North Pole Communicator that I bought on clearance last year after Christmas. It appeared under our tree the same day Veldor arrived. It's not quite as cool as we all expected, but it's still fun.
One of our neighbors, the McKenzies, organizes a Christmas caroling night for the kids in our neighborhood each year. They give the kids hot chocolate and take them around our little neighborhood caroling. Have I mentioned we live in an amazing neighborhood?!?
Teya and Dallin's school has a Cheistmas Sing every December. Dallin is in the back row, red shirt.
Tonight our neighbors had an Ugly Christmas Sweater party. About 10 couples in our neighborhood went. They provided dinner, which was awesome, and planned games, including a white elephant gift exchange, which was a lot of fun and pretty funny. I bought our gifts at DI: a candle snuffer, which everyone thought was pretty funny, and two snowman hot chocolate mugs. We ended up with a reindeer stuffed animal that sings and some fancy army pens.
Jared trying to open a gift with his feet. The presents were passed around, it was pretty fun. After this game we played Christmas Jepardy. One question Jared had was, how many ghosts were inThe Christmas Carol. He had NO idea, didn't even know the movie, so they told him just to guess and he threw out the number 4, and got it right!
Our Ugly Christmas sweaters! I bought the sweaters at DI (like Goodwill) and then bought cheap little Christmassy items to put on them. Teya helped me stitch the items onto the sweaters- didn't they turn out great?! Teya loved them and kept asking why we would call them ugly, because she thought they were asorable!!
Don't you love Jared's sweater?? He wasn't quite as excited about it as I was...
Well, we won first place in the ugly sweater contest!!! (Everyone voted). Teya and I were pretty excited, haha! We won these two things and a gift card.
I had to include these other pictures of Jared because he is so funny. Teya was taking forever to take the pictures= his "come on Teya!" face, haha!
