Everyday Live Happy

We had a great Christmas!  Of course we got great presents, but that isn't what I love about Christmas Day.  My favorite part of the day was a phone call that we got from our son who is serving a mission in Ethiopia.  We only get emails from him except for phone calls twice a year.  We got to talk to him for almost an hour!  It was great!  Of course that hour flew by, but that is okay.  Then we started a new tradition a few years ago.  We no longer get with extended family on Christmas (Aunts, Uncles, Cousins)  everyone is going every which way on Christmas.  So we started having a family Christmas party for all of our extended family on a different day during December.  Since I don't always have any of my brothers or sister or their families here on Christmas, I don't want my parents to make a big Christmas dinner just for us.  I don't want to make one either, so we came up with a great idea.  We make a huge breakfast and whoever is in town comes over for it.  This yea

Each week at church I get to work with the kids age 18 months to 11 years old.  I love it!  Some weeks it can be a little challenging when you have that many different personalities and personalities of the other adults who help teach their classes.  Most of the time though it goes pretty smoothly.  Since this is the Sunday before Christmas I wanted to give them a little gift.  I wanted it to be meaningful.  I wanted it to be an ornament preferably with a nativity.  I was having a hard time finding something that I liked that was both of those things.  Also it needed to not be expensive because we have a good number of children.  I was getting pretty discouraged until I saw this post on lifesjourneytoperfection.blogspot.com

I'm a girl so I really don't mind shopping, but I do not love shopping!  I like looking around, but I don't like the pressure of having to find a present.  Some people are very hard to shop for and I hate wandering around a store trying to find something that I think that they will like.  I hate that kind of pressure!  So we bought most of our big presents last weekend, but we still had a few things.  You know all of those odds and ends - stockings, my husband (I already had his big present), etc.  I am now officially done.  I will not be buying anything else because I'm not going shopping again before Christmas!  I do have to go and pick up a present that I ordered and had shipped to a store, but that is it.  Customer Service and I'm out of there!  I love it!  Now I just have to wrap everything.

We all have people on our Christmas list who are hard to buy presents for.  You know the ones who are either really picky or buy what they need or want when they need or want it.  We had two people on our list who fell into the "so hard to buy for" category.  I never know what to buy these people.  Also I don't want to give them the same thing each year.  This year though I think we did good.  We bought them both things that we had never given to them before.  I know that one of the people will like what we bought her - a Bath and Body Works gift card.  She loves their products just like I do.  However, I'm a huge believer in NOT choosing a scented product for anyone EVER.  What I think smells amazing, you might think it stinks and what you like, I might think is awful.  You can't choose certain things for other people and I believe that that is one of them.  So we got her a gift card.  (That is something that I would have appreciated last time someone gave me a s

I don't know what it is about lights that I love so much.  I just know that I love them!  I love driving around and looking at them.  I just smile when I see a house and yard filled with lights.  I will travel distances to go see a large display of lights.  I live in Utah and so we often travel to see the Christmas lights at Temple Square in Salt Lake City.  Today my husband and I finally got up most of the lights on our porch.  He hung snowflake lights along the top of our porch and they look great.  We were watching a movie together as a family tonight and our couch faces our porch.  I kept finding myself watching the snowflake lights instead of the movie!  It was even a movie that I really liked!  I really do love lights.  They really do make me happy!

I love Christmastime!  I have a lot of decorations and I hate that I only get to use them for about a month out of the year.  This year I wanted to a lot of decorating before Thanksgiving.  I did get some done, but not as much as I wanted to.  Since I don't have a lot of time during the week, each day I am putting up more decorations.  I could get stressed that it isn't all done yet, but that won't get it done any faster and will make me miserable.  So I've decided that decorations will go up daily and I will just enjoy doing a little more each day.  No stress.  I can just relax and love the season.  Now that makes me happy!