Insta-Friday Advent Edition

Cue the sleigh bells, we are getting ready for Christmas!

This week I've been crafting like crazy.

I mean crazy...every spare second and into the wee hours of the morning kind of crazy.

I've been working on this memory quilt for a friend. It is made from printed family photos and her mother's clothes. I finished the quilt top over the weekend.

Such an awesome way to honor someone's memory.

We pulled out all the Christmas boxes and things started to transform.

But I felt like my Christmas decorations were blah this year and needed something new.

So went back over my Christmas pins for some inspiration...

And inspiration I found!

Gotta love something new and sparkly and free!

Heck yeah.

I finished a custom order for Christmas garland.

I love a mix of funky and traditional during the holidays.

Makes me darn right giddy.

We have an elf. I love him.

He adds to the magic of Christmas.

I don't get anti-elf peeps.

Haters gonna hate. I guess.

But man they are missing out on some fun!

Frisbee is our elf. Man I love that creepy looking little elf!

He returns from the North Pole every year and brings back our Christmas books and a treat.

This year he brought little cans of Sprite and gifted the kids with their own nativity.

Frisbee loves baby Jesus too.

I'm super excited that we started a couple advent traditions this year! We lit our first advent candle and put our first ornament on our Jesse tree!

Our Advent candles are safely incased in a lantern...because my children cannot be trusted around open flame. If you know them, you know this to be true.

I had the honor to participate in a Jesse tree ornament exchange this year! Jesse trees are so cool.

A Jesse tree represents Jesus' family tree. It has an ornament and scripture meditation for each day through Advent to help prepare for Jesus' birthday!

The kids look forward to hearing the story and adding the ornament each night. I love how they love this part of our night.

They love it so much they fight over it...we now have a rotation of whose turn it is to put the ornament on each night.

There is just something so wrong about getting into a fist fight over who gets to put a biblical symbol on the tree.

Frisbee brought the kiddos a movie about St. Nick!

AJ said it was the best movie ever.

Did you know Rainbow Dash was there at Jesus' birth?

Ab teaches me something new everyday.

We watched Elf a couple times this week.

I love this movie.

There are not many movies I can watch more than once.

But this one cracks me up every.single.time.

SANTA?! I KNOW HIM!

I just like to smile, smiling's my favorite.

I love kid-created ornaments.

And nativities.

And kid-created nativity ornaments.

It has been freeze your butt off cold up in Colorado this week.

The awful kind of cold where the garage door opener doesn't work properly on the day your husband takes your keys to work in his coat pocket so you get to crawl under the one foot opening of the garage door in your white winter coat.

That kind of cold.

Lots of hot cocoa has been in order.

The thing about a quilt is that finishing the quilt top, although it is a major accomplishment, is only a fraction of the work that goes into finishing a quilt.

After the top is done comes...piecing the backing, sandwiching the layers, the actual quilting process, making the binding, and then actually binding it.

It's a process. A long process...

But man the finished product is so worth it.

I love, love, love, just love Christmas cards.

I love planning them, picking them out, stuffing them in envelopes, sealing them with festive colored washi tape, sticking labels and stamps on them, taking them to the post office and putting them in the little pull down flap door, and walking away knowing so many peeps are getting fun mail.

It just feels like such a happy accomplishment.

Look at that crisp stack of happiness right there.

It's one of my most favorite parts of Christmas.

Getting cards in the mail is pretty cool too.

I mean how often is it that someone actually sends you something, a real physical, tactile, paper something in the mail?!

Christmas cards rock.

St. Nick did indeed come to our house.

My children did have candy canes and chocolate for breakfast this morning.

And that's okay.

We also purchased and put up our Christmas tree last night.

Which I am just plain freakin' giddy about!

It was quite the spectacular night.

One, so spectacular, that it deserves its very own post in order to do it justice.

It was that spectacular.

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