Happy December from the Hanson family!
We’ve been celebrating lots over here! Our oldest daughter, Ashlinn, turned 13 in the beginning of the month, and we celebrated with In-n-Out, Blaze Pizza, cake and ice cream, waffles, and Cheetos — pretty much all the junk food we could manage! We also played a long game of Risk: Lord of the Rings edition, which we had to break up over the next couple of days. Ashlinn loves long games!
Now we’re looking forward to Christmas! We decorated our Christmas tree last week and turned on our Christmas lights outside. We usually enjoy hot cocoa and cookies while decorating our tree, but this year our second daughter, Carys, made a festive drink called “cinnacream” from a book series she and Ashlinn like to read. She also made “mallow melt” cookies from the same book series, and those were a big hit amongst her sisters.
We have a lot of other simple Christmas traditions that we like to participate in each year. With the pandemic still going on this December, we’ve had to make some changes to some of those traditions for this year, but we’re finding that we can still keep most of those traditions alive. We can still watch Christmas movies with popcorn, drive through town to look at Christmas lights together, and sing Christmas carols together. We can still make Christmas goodies and presents for family and friends. We can still read our family’s advent devotional and talk about Jesus coming to earth as a baby, and we can think together of ways to bless other people from afar.
We won’t get to hold our fun Christmas carol events at our house this year or make lots of apple crisps to give away, and we won’t get to see a lot of our extended family like we usually do. We are disappointed and sad about those losses, and we truly miss seeing you all! But we still have so much to be thankful for this season and so many ways that we can still celebrate!
How are you celebrating this year?