My favorite weekend of the year is always Thanksgiving weekend. It's the official start of the holiday season, involves lots of baking, cooking and eating and there is a good mix of relaxing and gearing up for the busy month of December. I love the traditions we've had, new ones we are making and mostly all the family time we get to spend together.
My favorite Thanksgiving tradition we started in our family is the Thanksgiving tree. This was our 5th year doing it and we all love reading the hands over the month and coming up with all the things and people we are thankful for. I love how the kids can remember that we have so much and even the silly things are still important to us. So here was this years tree (with hands up high so Simon would't tear them down!)
After a while, Simon wasn't so thankful for the tree anymore...poor kid.
We drove down to Matt's parents house on Thanksgiving morning to settle in for the weekend. We turned on the parade, pulled out the old toy boxes and I started cooking in the kitchen. This day is all about family and relaxing and that's just what we did.
Matt's parents have this old metal horse that all the kids have gotten to ride over the years. Now it's finally Simon's turn and I must say, he makes a pretty cute cowboy. Especially when paired with Santa pjs!
The next morning Matt and I headed out for our annual Black Friday shopping. We aren't the crazy mean people who are running around for deals but we do enjoy grabbing some hot coffee and wandering through the stores picking up some good sales on toys and clothes. After the morning is over I head out again with Matt's mom and then after dinner we head out a third time for some late night sales! Yes, it sounds crazy but really it's just fun to walk around together. Plus, I always lose 2 pounds over Thanksgiving weekend from all my walking! Not too many people can say that happens with a food filled holiday.
We had a lazy Saturday morning together before heading out to Watson's Nursery to visit the reindeer. Love cuddling up with Lucy for some girl time.
This was our 2nd year visiting Watson's and one of our new favorite traditions. Even though the trees are so beautifully decorated and there are about a million fragile gifts laying around they do such a nice job making it kid friendly with lots of activities for little ones. We grabbed some hot chocolate, looked at all the trees and then headed over to the reindeer for a visit. We got to do the scavenger hunt too, which the kids loved before writing letters to Santa. Such a fun morning!
Finally, on Sunday we went to cut down our Christmas tree! I think this may have been the easiest year yet. Kids were interested and excited, willing to help and we found a perfect tree in less than 10 minutes!
While Matt tackled tree duty, I wandered around the kid zone with the kids. We made sure to grab a few extra candy canes for the car ride home too.
We drove home after a long, fun weekend and got the tree up in the living room. I've been dreading the thought of keeping a toddler away from the Christmas tree for an entire month but surprisingly Simon has done really well! He's been naturally curious but so far all lights and fragile ornaments have stayed on the tree. We still have 24 days to go until Christmas but these first 4 days have been pretty darn successful.
Because I'm partly lazy and partly losing control of things lately I hesitantly decided to let the kids decorate the tree all by themselves. I was just there to pass out ornaments and suggest where some of the more fragile ones might go but they did the entire tree themselves. It's a bit cluttered in certain spots but really reflects this stage of life and all the chaos that ensues. And, I sort of love it. There will be plenty of years where I can have a perfectly decorated tree but these years are short. They were so excited and proud to show off the tree when Matt came home from work.
Carter got to put the star on top later that night and it was complete! Now we are ready to celebrate all this season has to bring, plus 2 birthdays. Whew...here we go!
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