Tis the season....

I feel like the holiday season passed by way to fast this year. We were out of town the last few weeks in November and didn't get into the full swing of things until the first week of December. I was also in school until December 12th. However, we did manage to get all our Christmas decorations and lights up! Of course John went all out with the lights this year. He said he did it for Eleanor, but I'm pretty sure he enjoys it just as much. We thought about getting an artificial tree this year, but ended up with a real one. We had fun going with the Hackings to pick it up.

The highlight of the season was having Eleanor around. She had Christmas down! She loved Santa and even loved sitting on his lap. She got to sit with her little friend, Aspen. We had coached her about seeing Santa and sitting on his lap. The day before she kept saying she was going to be nice to Santa and thought hard about what she wanted to ask him. She was really cute. When she sat on his lap she looked up at him and gave him a little wave. Here is what she told him she wanted: a REAL horse and REAL pig, but no ducks. She also wanted a brush. After she finished she reached over and gave him a hug. It was ideal!! After seeing Santa, she made sure to point out every Santa we saw and give him a wave.
Eleanor also loved learning new Christmas songs. She learned Jingle Bells, Santa Baby and Up on the House Top. She got a book that plays Up on the House Top and now she can sing most the song. She also wrote her first letter to Santa. She was really into it and spent quite some time making sure her drawings were perfect!

Eleanor did really good this year not to play with the Christmas tree or ornaments too much this year. However, I did catch her giving it a good flick!We made our annual trip to Temple Square to see the lights. This year we went with our friends Becky and Blake and enjoyed dinner at Settebello and a little Christmas shopping at Restoration Hardware and Pottery Barn before. Eleanor has been into temples lately, so this was a HUGE deal for her. She was squealing and so excited to see the temple and the lights. This year they had a nativity in the reflection pool and Eleanor said that it Jesus was swimming in the water and she wanted to go with him. She also pointed out a statue of Joseph Smith that the rest of us missed. (Thanks to the nursery manual she loves to tote around, she has become quite the church scholar). Another cute thing she did was copy John with her hands in her pockets. She would not allow us to put mittens on her. Poor girls hands were ice!! After Temple square we visited "Christmas Street" for our first time. We all loved it and John said he would LOVE to live on a street that went all out like that. The next day Eleanor was talking to Mimi on the phone and told her we saw the lights at "Temple Circle".