Christmas Festivities, Part 2

So, continuing on now...the day of Tyler's program was his last day of school before he was off for 2 weeks. After his program, things finally started to settle down a little bit, with just 4 days to go until Christmas. I was amazed at just how much was crunched into every last second of time before Christmas Eve. It was exhausting! But one night we felt that we really needed to get out and do something, so we took the kids to Fulton St. It is a cute little street downtown all decked out for Christmas. Santa is there, there are trees, they make it snow, there are live bands playing, some live reindeer you can see, and we thought it sounded fun. And it probably would have been if we had got there before it was all done for the night!! We got there at about 8:30 and Santa was gone, the reindeer were gone, the bands were finished playing...you get the picture. Bummer! Oh well! We still walked around a saw what there was and the boys had a good time (they didn't really realize what they had missed out on!).

There was a gingerbread Superdome and it really was pretty cool! (this was the best pic I could get, the area was really crowded). It must have taken forever to make!

The boys were probably way more impressed by the train that ran around it, though!

And who doesn't love a HUGE gorgeous Christmas tree? I've decided I want a fleur de lis light to top my tree next year! I loved it!

A few other tidbits about Christmas before I blog about Christmas Eve and Christmas Day...our tree is definitely always a 'family style' tree and is adorned by ornaments of every shape & size. Each year we get the boys a new ornament and try to have it be something somewhat meaningful. This year it was almost Christmas and I still didn't have an ornament for them. I was finishing up some shopping at Target and saw these nutcrackers and snatched them up real quick! You see, Sam and Tyler have been obsessed with nutcrackers, they totally love them for some reason and pick them out everywhere we go and spot them in decorations everywhere. They have been begging me to buy a big one. So I saw a nutcracker fisherman and a nutcracker soccer player and low and behold, the ornament issue was solved! Sam got the fisherman since he caught his first fish in 2010 and Tyler got the soccer player since he played soccer this last year. They loved them!

And I see here that Tyler moved his nutcracker's arms into more of a super-model-soccer-player type position. Nice! :)

And, of course, I love my fleur de lis! I would decorate an entire tree with them if I could!

And we had all of the fun handmade ornaments that will forever adorn my trees. I love them! This one was one of Tyler's from school...

Sam made this one in nursery and he was SOOO proud of it!

And here is another one Tyler made in school (he made a total of 4 this year, whoa!). He is in the 'Kermit' class so this is supposed to be a Kermit Santa.

And my absolute fav, fav, favorite thing this year was this beautiful little creche Tyler made for Garrett & me at school. I thought it was just the sweetest thing and I just love it, down to every last detail. He had it all wrapped up with a card for us and I was impressed by the amount of work that must have gone into that project. I'm sure it was stressful for those teachers!!!

So...with all those things out of the way, I think we were pretty set to get ready for Santa to come!