Now that Thanksgiving is complete & we can really dive into Christmas, it really is the most wonderful time of the year.

My favorites are baking treats, Christmas jammies on my babies, Christmas music all day long, Christmas books to cuddle up & read, twinkly lights all over our house. It’s so much fun. I can never get enough of Thanksgiving leftovers. Forget turducken – this is the perfect combo for me.

This week we made a paper chain to count down the days left until Christmas. The past couple years we’d gotten K a Lego advent calendar & last year we got Alia a Barbie one too, but this year I really want our focus to be less about the “stuff” we’re getting. We already have so much stuff, and there’s plenty of joy in the Christmas season without getting more of it. So I told them about how when I was a kid my brother and sisters and I made a paper chain to count down the days. They liked the idea & have been enjoying taking turns ripping off a chain each day.

We’re also doing this advent reading plan & have been in Isaiah & Jeremiah so far, which has been fun. Awhile ago at church they gave a statistic from Dr. Peter Stoner that the probability of someone fulfilling just 8 of the best known prophecies from the Old Testament concerning the Messiah – such as the place he’d be born, the way he would die – was 1 in 100 quadrillion. It’s been fun to think about the anticipation of his coming throughout the centuries before Christ’s birth while doing our reading.