Christmas tour

I love my house right now. We've been decorating since Thanksgiving since I had said I'd open my house for our church's women's tour of homes. We got it all decorated by Wed this past week and then drove Andy and Riley to Portland at 4am on Thurs so they could fly to Houston to visit Mimmy for a long weekend. I got home from Portland at 9am and spent a day cleaning to get ready for the tour that took place last night. The house looks beautiful all decorated and it's still clean (good thing we were out of the house most of the day today). The tour was fun. Tegan and Conner loved all the yummy food on the table (crackers, chips, cheese, dips, cookies, cheesecake, candies, etc). When I asked if they wanted me to make them some dinner they said I didn't need to since they could just snack on everything that was out. Ladies at church provided almost everything so I only needed to worry about getting the house ready. Tegan played a few Christmas carols on the keyboard for each of the four groups that came through. He also ran the train around the tree occassionally. When those two got tired of entertaining they watched Rudolph in Conner's room. I was asked to share with each group about our Christmas traditions. We don't have many so it was pretty short each time. They seemed to love all the boys' crafts that we have hanging everywhere. Since we were able to stop school at Thanksgiving so we could focus on Christmas fun they have created many decorations. The tree dons a great popcorn chain that everyone contributed to, their doors are covered in their colorful tissue paper snowflakes. The white, glitter snowflakes are hanging in various places around the house. They stuffed colored paper inside glass ornament balls to hang with the snowflakes. Tegan, Conner and I made a great 3-d (sort of) manger scene for a big blank spot on a wall. Tegan can't get over how cool it looks and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with it too. I'm not an artist so I figured if we could just put a lot of texture on it it would look fairly good. Tegan came up with all sorts of things (twigs, felt, glitter, sand, paint, leather, popsicle sticks, cloth) and drew great faces on Joseph and Mary.

I sat in the living room tonight addressing Christmas letters while the fire burned, all the twinkling lights were on and carols played on the stereo. Then I watched a movie on the laptop. It's so peaceful in here. I want to stay up all night enjoying it. However, that wouldn't bode well for my day with the boys tomorrow. So, I must be off to bed.

Another quick note. If you are planning on flying for the holidays don't bother wrapping your packages until you arrive at your destination. I wrapped some for Andy to deliver to his mom and the security personnel unwrapped them all and even broke one. They also almost lost our Narnia dvd that they took with them. Just before leaving the gate the flight attendant asked if anyone had packed a dvd. Thankfully Andy remembered I had stuck it in there and said something. After he identified it they handed it to him. I was shocked to hear what they did to his luggage.