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The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas – Day 17

Today for our “special thing” we decided to talk about what Christmas traditions are the most important to us. Everyone had something different they liked – though narrowing it down wasn’t easy for everyone. Some of the favorite traditions were – opening one gift on Christmas Eve, the Christmas Eve Candlelight service, reading the Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve, doing the tree for the animals, looking at Christmas lights and doing the “Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas.” It was kind of fun talking about all of our traditions – and we have many. Some of the kids can’t seem to give any of them up and others don’t care as much.

Posting a couple more pictures from the church program on Sunday. I had meant to post more earlier, but ended up using other pictures.

The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas – Day 16

Today our “special thing” was to take jars of candy that we made to McDonald’s for the employees. They are so nice to us when we visit and we just want them to know we appreciate how friendly and kind they are to us. That was pretty much it for the day, except we cleaned and wrapped a lot of gifts. Bethany did go and finish her Christmas shopping today and came right home and wrapped them. We even got really energetic and put up a tree in the library. I have always loved the library tree, but just didn’t get around to doing it this year. Everytime I passed the library it just didn’t seem right, and I really missed that tree so today I decided I would get it done. Well, its up, but not decorated nor does it have lights on it yet. I plan to do that tomorrow.

Since we took no pictures of the jars of candy we made I am posting a few pictures from our afternoon at Agecroft Hall. We spent several hours there on Sunday and really enjoyed it. It was our first time there. Agecroft Hall is a 15th century Tudor manor house, originally from Lancashire, England that was dismantled, shipped to the U.S., and rebuilt on the James River in the 1920’s by the Williams family. It is a beautiful place and was such fun to visit with all the activities. I think we will make this a yearly thing.

It was very dark in most of the house so a little difficult to get a lot of pictures. But, I did get a few.