It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

We started off our holiday festivities this year with a visit to Santa at Brad's work party. Santa was taken off guard by the kid throwing a fit behind us line and for sure making a note on his list of naughty...G1 & Brad were doing what they were supposed to do, G2 was also checking out the above mentioned kid, and W became suddenly quiet when he approached the big guy. I am thinking that it is going to be a long time before we get a perfect kodak moment with Mr. Claus....but hey, our pictures have a lot of stories!

Next we headed off to watch The Nutcracker. One of our dear friend's daughter was dancing in several roles which was really neat for G to watch...plus, it was an absolutely beautiful preformance. Then we rushed off to ring the bell for the Salvation Army for a couple of hours. Brad had to cover for us for about 20 minutes while we came from the ballet....he claims to have gotten a lot of sympathy money for his bell ringing endeavors with the two boys (one who was crying loudly most of the time!)! After her volunteer stint of ringing the bell for almost two hours, it was very apparent that G1 has a much better understanding of what the spirit of Christmas is all about. I hope that in this media driven world we live in, we can do a good job of instilling in our children what the true meaning of Christmas is all about.