Decorating the Christmas Tree

 'Tis the season...

We had a nice Thanksgiving. We cooked a small turkey, and made a casserole, some mashed potatoes, and bread. It was a good meal.

On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Evie helped me haul our Christmas tree ornaments up from the basement. She was pretty excited to get started with decorating the tree. And she thought adding hooks to the ornaments was pretty fun, so I didn't stop her from taking over that task.

Evie filled in the lower half of the tree with ornaments. Considering that I'm not much taller than Evie, Jon mostly added the rest, where Evie nor I could reach.

Evie took the time to perfect the placement of her ornaments, moving them from one branch to another, then back again, then to another new branch.

Or, she just had so much fun putting ornaments on the tree that she didn't want to stop. 

I eventually convinced Evie to step away from the tree with a promise to make sugar cookies together. She loves to help in the kitchen.

Really, she does love to help.

Even better, she likes the tasks she gets to do completely on her own.

We finished our day with taking a batch of cookies to a neighbor. We're almost ready for Christmas, now. Evie just needs to go tell Santa what she wants from him, which she'll be doing soon.

Cutting the Christmas Tree

We decided to pick up our Christmas tree this weekend. Next weekend, after Thanksgiving, we'll decorate it. We wanted to go when there would be fewer people and more trees to choose from.

We ended up choosing a 9' Fraser Fir from Krueger's Christmas Trees.

Evie freezing and Jon goofing off as we look for a tree.

Our tree. It didn't look as tall out with the other trees as it did once we got it home.

Evie trying to drag the tree to the cart on her own.

It was better getting her dad's help.

Evie forgot about how cold she was to help her dad bring the tree back to the barn where we could pay for it and load it on our car to take home.

Como Zoo

Hiking by the Mississippi

The weather was nice the weekend before Halloween, so we took advantage and went for a hike along the Mississippi.

Happy Halloween!

This post is late, but better late than never. Here are photos from the weekend before Halloween (from a small trick-or-treat event at Tamarack Nature Center), and one from Halloween night. Evie had a lot of fun pretending to be a bird and trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. There are more kids in the neighborhood than I expected, and I ran out of candy early. Evie spent over an hour trick-or-treating, and she filled her bucket with lots of tasty candy that she doesn't want to share.