It's almost Christmas!

I love Christmas. I love everything about it. When I was growing up, Christmas was a huge event at our house. The very best memories I have of my dad are at Christmas, because I don't think anyone loves Christmas as much as he did. He always made it really fun for our family. We had a lot of fun family traditions that always made it extra fun and special.

Probably the best memories I have of my childhood are of sitting around the kitchen table playing games on Christmas afternoons. My dad loved board games and it was always a big family event to have game tournaments at the holidays. My mom would make lots of yummy treats and we would sit around and eat too much food and play games all afternoon. Those are memories that make me smile.

When I became a mother it was my goal to carry those traditions on to my own children. Christmas is still a really big deal at our house. We get up at the crack of dawn to open presents and then we have a great big breakfast, spend the morning putting toys together and looking at all of our gifts, and then we spend the whole day in our pj's, watching Christmas movies, playing games and eating way too much. It's an event that we all look forward to.

Shawn always makes sure to save some vacation time so that Christmas isn't a one day event here. He's going to be home tomorrow through the rest of the week, so we have lots of time to do fun activities and really enjoy some family time. The day after Christmas we'll go see a movie, play more games and do more fun family things.

I'm like a five year old at Christmas, I love it so much. So today I'm keeping an eye on the clock, just counting down the hours until Shawn gets home and our extended Christmas celebration can get started. We have some fun Christmas Eve traditions that I'm looking forward to tomorrow. We let the kids open one present on Christmas Eve, which is always new pajamas. That's something we did at my house growing up that I always loved. It was always really fun to wear new pajamas to bed on Christmas eve. Then after the kids put their new pj's on, we make hot chocolate, get in the car with some blankets and our hot chocolate and we drive around looking at Christmas lights. That's Shawn's favorite Christmas eve tradition from his childhood, so it's something he always looks forward to.

Then we come home, put reindeer food on the sidewalk for the reindeer, we put the Santa key out for Santa (so that he can get in the house, since he can't get through our fireplace!) put cookies and milk out for Santa and then we put the kids to bed. It's something we all look forward to every Christmas eve. I love watching the kids get excited about Santa coming. It just reminds me of being a kid. I'm 33 years old and I still get excited on Christmas eve.

So today I'm killing time. I've pretty much got all the Christmas preparations ready to go and I'm ready to start the fun! We don't have a lot going on today, I need to find some sort of fun project to do with the kids or something to keep us busy.

I can already feel the excitement in the air around here and I'm loving every minute of it. Only 40 more hours to go until Christmas!