It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We put up our Christmas tree the Saturday after Thanksgiving, which is our yearly tradition. Joel was acting a little scrooge like since he wasn't too keen on the mess I was making, but he got over it. Guilt trips like, "Is this how you want to remember Tessa's first Christmas" and "What kind of memories are we building here" made it pretty easy to convince him. He's a sucker sentimental like that.

We have a tradition that goes like this: Every year we each get to pick out an ornament for the tree for that year. We write the year on the back and hang it on the tree, replacing our new ones with a commercial, store bought holiday ball. When we first got a tree, we just went to Target and bought a bunch of colored glass balls. You know what I'm talking about, the boring, regular Christmas balls. Sorry, every time I say Christmas balls, I laugh a little. Anyways, as we get a new, sentimental ornament each year, we'll toss out the commercial, mass produced Christmas ball (haha). Eventually, we'll get rid of all the boring regular Christmas balls (hee hee) and replace them with these cute, yearly ornaments.

Now that we have Tessa, we will also add her to this tradition. This year of course, we'll pick it for her, but I can't wait until following Christmases when she can pick out her own! With it being her first Christmas, she's already gotten a couple ornaments as gifts that we hung up, but we also wanted to get her one for our family tree. We haven't picked out our ornaments for 2010 yet, but we will soon! I am also slowly building my Christmas stuff stash so I have more things to decorate the house with.

 We also got new stockings this year. Obviously Tessa needed one, and Joel and I needed new ones. We had been using the same ones we had since our first Christmas, back in 2001. These were silly ones from some novelty store. Mine had a Yankees emblem and Joel's had a Cowboys one. We kept these for fun, but we will use the new ones!

What are your Christmas traditions?