holidays

we spent thanksgiving in provo with austin's family. austin had been sick that week and was not feeling well on the morning of thanksgiving but managed to feel well enough to have some real thanksgiving food instead of the saltine crackers and gatorade that had been staples of his diet much of the week. we slept over at austin's family's house with every intention of doing the shopping adventure early the next morning but decided that we'd rather sleep in than be tempted to buy stuff. we stayed around to play games friday and saturday and had a fun weekend.


on saturday after thanksgiving, laura was getting really excited about putting up christmas decorations. we went out with the intention of just getting a few ornaments to decorate laura's little baby christmas tree from college (think of the charlie brown tree but with more branches, you'll see it in a second), but we fell in love with more than a few ornaments and ended up getting too many decorations for the little tree to handle. luckily, we had previously been offered one of austin's family's old trees, so we went back to get it and began christmasing our home.


laura competes with the tree in a cuteness contest and wins! but the tree is still very cute -- we decided to go with a blue and silver tree because the decorations just looked so elegant and... wintery. that and we just really like blue.


the finished christmas tree in the corner of the living room


detail of the tree


more detail of the tree -- our favorite photo of the bunch


this is laura's cute little christmas tree that she used as a freshman at byu. she was excited to receive it as a wedding/bridal present from carly, her roommate that year. we decided to put it up in our office and put some of austin's ornaments (he gets one every year from his grandma) on it along with a few others.


the holiday season has extra meaning for us. it was the weekend of thanksgiving last year (right after spending the holiday with laura's family in california) that we first started talking about getting married. then in december, austin proposed while we were decorating one of his family's christmas trees (ask laura for the whole story!) and laura was able to spend that christmas with austin's family. and just when you thought the story couldn't get any sweeter, laura realized today that the tree we are borrowing from austin's family is the same one we decorated the night we got engaged! cute!

we love the holidays and we're excited to share them with our family and friends.