more holiday stuff

We're enjoying holiday activities this month. One of the LDS church stakes in the area puts on a nativity display with hundreds of different nativities that people from the area have collected. Guess who this one reminded us of?

This one obviously reminded Austin of his mission in Ukraine.

This one (from somewhere in Europe) looked like it belonged in Austin's mom's kitchen (the one in Utah, not the one in Phoenix) with the beautiful blue and white coloring.

Out of all the hundreds of nativity sets, we both agreed that this was our favorite. 

We went to the city hall for a tree lighting party -- and then along the river trail where we heard carolers and saw lights along the way.

We met our friends the Dimonds there -- Brooklyn loves to see her buddies!

Christmas jammies!

We got to open a box from Grandma Taylor with the traditional candy countdowns.

Brooklyn loves the cards on/in presents -- we'll see how long that lasts.

We also got to open a box from Grandma Self...

...and she loved the little Christmas toys inside!

We ended up at the Bellevue mall again and remembered the lights and show we saw part of a week or two before. We were right on time so we stayed and watched for a little bit.

They had drummers and nutcracker men on stilts and polar bears and princesses and fairies and all kinds of things to entertain the kids. We weren't sure what Brooklyn thought about it -- the drumming was pretty loud so she might have been a little scared.

The lights were nice and we enjoyed seeing people out with their families and friends.

We had our Christmas party at the church last night -- Santa was there for a bit at the beginning and we wanted to let Brooklyn meet him and sit on his lap...

...which she wasn't too excited about.

The theme of the church party was "a night in Bethlehem" -- the gym was decorated to look like a market from the time period and people were invited to dress the part.

Austin is typically skeptical about activities like this but even he was fairly impressed with how it turned out. It looked even better later on when everyone was there in costume and sitting on the floor on blankets -- we were too busy "selling" fruit from our stand to get a photo once the party started!

Here's our cute little shepherd girl! She wanted nothing to do with our improvised costume until we told her it was "a hat" -- she was instantly okay with it after that. Girls and their accessories... :)