The girls love Thanksgiving for two reasons:  homemade noodles and the green light on starting Christmas fun!  We got our tree on "Black Friday" and put it up that night.  (And it's a good thing we did because Chris was sick the rest of the weekend!)  The girls and I made our first batch of Christmas cookies while Chris got the tree inside and up in our tree stand.  I wanted us to have some sort of "fun" dinner before decorating the tree, so we did cheese fondue.  It was a huge hit!  Here is a start to the festivities around our house....


We started off the season by getting Christmas Build-A-Bears. 
The girls used their own money to purchase these fun, new additions to our family.
Avery's named hers Holiday (Holly) Moose, while Mia named hers Molly Christmas.

   
During our first Christmas trip to the mall, Livie found some new things to climb on,
while Mia spent time reading to her new friend, Molly Christmas.


That is one crazy Christmas baby.  She has already broke four ornaments!


Chris is helping Mia get the Santa on the top of the tree. 


Avery loves hanging all the ornaments on the tree.

This year Avery really wanted to try to string cranberries and popcorn after seeing it on a movie made by the American Girl Doll company.  It ended up being a fun project for both Avery and Mia.  The popcorn was a little tricky, and I later learned you are supposed to use stale popcorn (ours was still warm from me popping it!), but the girls really got into this, especially Avery.  This is definitely something we will do again.


My little crafter.


Mia got a little bored after awhile, so she entertained us with her cranberry mustache.


Ta-da!!

One of the things I loved about this project was how much of Avery and Mia's personality came out while doing this.  Avery was all about making it perfect, coming up with a pattern and completing her project.  She wanted to find a prominent place to display her cranberry string when she was done.  Mia, on the other hand, strung some cranberries, ate a lot of popcorn and then asked why we didn't just use marshmallows instead of popcorn.  Leave it to my little inventor to come up with a solution to our problem without really even caring about the problem.  She entertained herself with creative cranberry sculptures, giggling to herself.  God has blessed both of them with such amazing gifts!