Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Eve, friends!! This is our favorite time of the year, and can’t wait to celebrate with friends and family! We live incredibly busy lives, but we do our best to be intentional with our time during the Christmas season. This year, Reid suggested that we carry on the tradition led by our parents when we were kids. We went to the Bradbury Christmas Tree Farm and cut down our own tree! What’s crazy, is that both of our parents took us to that exact tree farm on the same day every year, the day after Thanksgiving, all through our childhood! So we were probably there at the same time and never knew it!! It was sentimental and surreal to be back at the tree farm, this time together, carrying on the tradition. We originally planned on getting an 8 foot tree, but the 10-footers were just so beautiful! Hey, what’s the point in having these 10 foot ceilings in our new house if we’re not going to make use of them! 😉

The next day, our good friends Jackson and Ilona came over to help decorate the tree. We underestimated how hard it would be to wrap slippery ribbon around a tree that tall! It only took the 4 of us about 4 hours, but the tree got decorated! This was so much more than just cutting down a tree and hanging a bunch of shiny ornaments on it. From returning to a piece of our childhood, to making irreplaceable memories with precious friends, to the love and history behind the ornaments… the entire experience is so special. While we were on our honeymoon almost 6 years ago, we decided to collect ornaments from every place we travel to. Our first ornament was a glass ball with the word “Seaside.” We stayed in Seaside, Florida for our honeymoon, and seeing that ornament takes us right back to that little shop in town where we made that small, but impactful purchase together as husband and wife.  We have ornaments from Colorado, Mexico, Missouri, Arizona, Nashville, and all over Italy!

What Christmas traditions do you love? Are you savoring this precious time with family and friends, or letting the business of life take its place? We aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, so please cherish those you love, and make sure they know how much they mean to you.

Merry Christmas, and God bless you!

Thanks so much, Ilona, for the beautiful photos of us decorating the tree!

And here are the stories behind the ornaments!