A Jake & Bri Christmas!

I can officially say without a doubt this year's Christmas has been the best and most relaxing Jake and I have had in about 5 years. How come? Well, because Jake has a job where I see him nights and weekends now. It's incredible. We definitely took advantage of the time together and got "Christmasy".

Jake put lights on the house... (we've never done that before) We bought those old-fashioned large bulbs. Aren't they cute? We keep getting compliments. The rest of the house was too high for Jake to get to and we ran out of lights, so that's why it might look half done. Hey, it's our first time. :)



Every year we buy a Christmas ornament that represents the year together. How apropos is this?

Then, with all of the extra time on my hands from having my husband around I decided to re-live my childhood and bake and decorate cookies. I didn't realize that this really wasn't Jake's thing, so I ended up decorating about 4 dozen cookies. Whoops. :) It still was pretty fun, but after a while I felt like I Love Lucy in the candy shop, "Speeder up!" Jake and I adopted a family this Christmas so I gave them some cookies and I also brought some to 2 different Christmas parties. They were a hit!

Oh yeah, and then there was Elf Night... the youth group's annual party event where we get all of the kids together for a nightly showing of the movie "Elf". We have hot chocolate and cookies and everyone dresses up. It was actually pretty fun. The kids LOVED Jake. This picture was taken by my mother-in-law Shari - her and her friends stayed over for a conference in Phoenix and they arrived just as we were out the door. So embarrassing but pretty funny!

And that's it! We'll be back in SoCal on Christmas Eve and have 4 family Christmas parties to attend. We're really excited to see everyone. Hopefully we can get together with friends too.