Our Favorite Things: Christmas '10

A tribute to Christmas 2010 must be done in order to share what few pictures we acutally captured of such a wonderful season and vacation. So here is a short list of some of our favorite things:

1) Seeing Sydney and Tate dressed in cottonball outfits as sheep for the nativity scene at our ward party. It was just adorable.

2) Finding Dean had broken through his candy cane, within the 10 mintues we drove home from the ward party, and managed to get it all over himself. We had to stick him straight in the tub. Babies have magical powers when it comes to candy-finding and eating we've discovered.

3) Making multiple cranberry-orange mini-loaves and going caroling to deliver them to our friends as a family.

4) Finding an abandoned Christmas Tree that was a perfect addition to our humble home decor. It was just the right size to fit on top of our table where Dean couldn't get to it. 

5) Making homemade ornaments out of recycled materials. Some old pipe-cleaner, paper towel rolls, wrapping paper, and glitter glue. We also spent $1.50 on a few small clear plastic picture frames which we decorated with glitter and then put our family photo in each of them as small and economical gifts for our parents.

6) Decorating our livingroom window-sill like a fireplace mantle and making a construction-paper advent chain with scriptures and activities to do as a family each night. 

7) Watching Dean terrorize our parents homes, chase around the dogs and cat, and make all sorts of new discoveries and friends.

8) Brittany and her mother designing and sewing a gorgeous comforter out of beautiful materials in a giraffe pattern; it's big enough to cover a future king bed, if we can ever afford it!

9) Getting so many thoughtful and heartfelt gifts from everyone that we couldn't take them all home!

10) Being able to drive there and back, and everywhere around the High Desert in our cute little rental car that had a rotten banana in the glove box from the last users! :) It was a good little car. Surviving pot holes, ice, rain, snow, and washed out streets and doing it all economically. We'll miss you Zippy!

Love,

The James Anderson Family