I think was probably my favorite Christmas yet with the boys. They were old enough to start really understanding about how everything worked. I tried really hard this year to be intentional about balancing the teaching of Baby Jesus with the natural indoctrination of Santa and Christmas magic. I think we did pretty well overall. We talked a lot about Baby Jesus and the boys loved the fact that he was born in a manger with animals and hay. Their favorite Christmas song quickly became Away in the Manger. :) I even had the idea of a Christmas mouse coming to visit us. I found a book at the library called Bartholomew's Blessing about a little mouse who visits Baby Jesus the night he is born. I bought a tiny stuffed mouse on Amazon and Bartholomew came to visit the last 10 days before Christmas. I wasn't super great about it, but the idea was for Bartholomew to teach us about the true meaning of Christmas and give us fun tasks occasionally as a family: looking at Christmas lights, making cookies, etc. I'm not sure the boys really bought him being a mouse that came alive at night, but they thought he was fun and seemed to like having him around. I'm hoping they get more into the magic of him next year.
We also made a goal of doing 2-3 advent devos a week. We followed the Adornaments series from Family Life that my mom passed down to us. It has a short devo and an ornament that ties into a name of Jesus. The boys' favorite part was definitely seeing the candles lit while we sang a song and then getting to blow them out at the end. It's a wonder no one got burned!
GG Bon was here this year which added an element of extra fun (and extra craziness at times!). It was good to have her here though and the boys warmed right up to her.
The boys are of course still train crazy, but this made Christmas extra fun this year since we knew exactly what to get them that would make them so happy. I called it a very Thomas Christmas. Their big Santa gift this year was a train table. We had bought one back in October from Sportsman's Guide. It was a great deal and looked pretty good. So BJ set it up on the evening of 12/23. We were feeling pretty on top of it. He got it all set up and put the tracks together and called me in. I was underwhelmed. He did what any dad who had just spend an hour and a half putting a gift together would do and tried to convince me that it was great and just what we were wanting. I wasn't convinced. The tracks were just a simple figure 8 with an oval around. It had looked more exciting in the picture due to buildings, trees, and people/animals, but I just knew in my heart that this just wasn't the one for us and our train loving boys. See photo below.
So he asked me if I'd had a different one in mind. I sat down and quickly found a really cool looking one on the Toys R Us website. We sat down and watched the video of it together oooing and ahhhing at all the cool features. The video ended and BJ looked at me and said, "Damn, that was cool." I cracked up and we agreed that was the one. It had everything!
See? No comparison. So we began calling stores and found out that Toys R Us was open 24 hours that night. We caught wind that there might be 1-2 left at the metro north location, a good 40 minutes away, but of course they weren't answering their phones and we couldn't get through. This set was on sale and they were gone everywhere. So finally at about 11:00 BJ said, "Make me some hot cocoa, I'm heading out." We were living the plot of "Jingle All the Way"!
A little over an hour later I got a text saying "no go". My heart sank, but I was fully prepared and almost expecting that to be the case. He came home late and the next morning I decided to try the OP store one more time to see if the metro north location still showed some. I knew the trucks were coming in that night with more shipments. I called and she put me on hold to check. I wasn't very optimistic about this location, but a minute later she came back and said they had one!! I ran up to tell BJ I was going, but he threw back the covers, told me to make him so coffee and said he had started this and was going to finish it! Sure enough an hour later I got this awesome pic from him!
We got one!! I told him we probably needed to do about 5 advent devos when he got home to get us back in a sane and proper Christmas mindset. But once we set it up the next night it was perfect and I couldn't wait to see their faces! We'd also purchased a "lot" of Thomas wooden trains to go with it. I began to realize that with this awesome train table we really hardly needed any other gifts. It felt fairly certain that we had gone a bit train overboard. They pretty much had all Thomas stuff, but at least it was different items. For instance, a Thomas memory game, Thomas spy set, Thomas placemats, etc. Ok, yes definitely overkill. :)
We set up everything downstairs and were ready for Christmas morning. The boys had even chosen the cookies they wanted to set out for Santa. I had asked if they wanted to give the reindeer anything like a carrot. They agreed to the carrot and also selected cheese. Sure, why not?
