Hang a Shining Star

Here's a photo of Ye-Ye and Madison decorating their tree. This is Ye-Ye and Nana's tree, fresh and waiting for ornaments to go up on. Tonight we visited with them for a short while - Madison helped decorate the Christmas tree, hanging up quite a few ornaments where she could. You could see some of it was quite a stretch. The rest of the night she spent watching a Christmas movie, eating snacks and playing dolls with Nana. It was a nice night together - just think: Madison will be looking under this tree for presents in just a few short days! The chain on the wall says six more days. Just six more sleeps 'til Christmas!

Earlier in the day, Mommy once again set us up for some fun: Christmas cookies! Mommy rolled out and cut up plenty of shapes, as you can see from the photo. Those aren't the only shapes we did - Mommy had other trays set up with even more cookies, and even more different shapes! Mommy has a thing for cookie cutters: She has plenty of different shapes for different holidays. Daddy and Madison have a thing for cookies: we like to decorate and eat them! In our defense, we only ate one this time around. We spent most of the time decorating each shape with different color sprinkles. Madison is getting much better at the concept of using an appropriate amount of sprinkles on cookies. Gone are the days of dumping the entire bottle on a cookie shape! Although, from this picture here, you wouldn't think that. One of my favorite shapes on the tray there is a camel, by the way. You see the camel? That's a Christmas shape: it's from the Nativity. We can make Nativity cookies here if we wanted too. We found, however, that star shapes and Christmas trees were easier to decorate. Plus, they seem to say "Christmas" a whole lot more than a camel.

We had Christmas music playing all day, and had time to plug in "White Christmas" while we were doing a bit of decorations. Madison actually watched a bit of that with interest - she likes the dancing and singing routines. We do too.

After cookies, it was time to do a little Christmas shopping. There's always one item that is "out," and this year we've found it again. It's the perfect white elephant gift, and by gum, Daddy is now determined to find it. We saw it for sale somewhere - I'll let you know what it is in a couple days, just in case any readers are going to be present for the gift exchange. You see, on Christmas, we'll be each bringing in essentially a gag gift, and we'll all do that exchanging game where everyone steals each other's gifts. If I can find this one we were looking for tonight, I guarantee everyone will be wanting to steal it. I myself will want to steal it, in fact!

We did find other things while shopping, so there was some mixed results. Still, with only six days left, we're feeling a little bit of the pinch to find what we need as soon as possible. We'll be okay, no matter what. It was great to get out of that hectic atmosphere of shopping tonight, and head over to Nana and Ye-Ye's house. It's a great place to just relax and chill out. And, decorate a tree too!