It's Christmas Time in our City...

Since I'm too slow and too tired to do multiple posts, this one will sum up much of our Christmas season thus far.

First up--the annual Santa Claus and Fire Truck visit put on by our fire station.  The truck is all decked out and over the course of 3 weekends, drives down every street in our town.  Santa visits and collects toys for tots.  Very great.

Check out this fire truck!!  Plus imagine it blaring really loud Christmas music.  Obviously, you can see, it's a neighboorhood event!

Right behind the fire truck is Santa on his sleigh.  He gave the kids big handfuls of candy.  So great! 

Next up--well, there is no real name for it.  We call it 'the amazing Christmas light show at that house on Tripp Rd.'  The home owner has a ton of Christmas lights and syncronizes them to Christmas songs.  Every Thurs-Sun, there are 3 different showings.  You drive up and park in the field across the street, tune in your radio and sit back and enjoy almost 40 minutes of syncronized Christmas light awesomeness!  We've been twice this year. 

No picture can do it justice--maybe a youtube video could but I prefer the real deal.  Here are some happy viewers in the van.  Gotta love having 3 of us in the passenger seat!

 Followed by McDonalds ice cream cones, of course!

 Next up--decorating Christmas cookies with some awesome neighbors.  Usually our Monday night family night is just us but we ventured out this season and had the neighbors join us for a fun night.  Much sugar was consumed!!

 This year our home got an Elf on the Shelf.  Our neighbor and Andrew's bus buddy, Andrew, got an Elf on the Shelf this year after his cousin asked their elf to send an elf to their home.  So our sweet neighbor, Andrew, asked his elf to send an elf to our home.  After 3 days of our Andrew coming home from school and searching and just knowing this elf would magically come, it did.  Elves are awesome like that!

Actually, it's been a lot of fun.  The kids enjoy searching every morning and trying to find "Snowflake"
(note--too many Andrews in the neighborhood makes for confusing storytelling.  Good thing our other neighbor Andrew wasn't involved in this tale.)

 And then there was Santa--he came to our ward Christmas party...before the party (the best possible way to do it).  The kids were excited to have a chat.

And there you have it.  With 4 days til the big day, we still have lots of fun in store.  I'm really looking forward to the days afterwards as well with Matt off work!

Merry Christmas!!!