The TRUE meaning of New Years
Love to you all, Sandra
PS Went to see The Great Debaters last night as a reward for our office work--really good; I recommend it highly.
I'll try and post some pictures and short videos when we get back to Rexburg and can load them up on our computer. Hope you had a beautiful holiday! It was great to talk to some of you. Sorry we missed the rest of you--- we don't have cell-phone service out here and I didn't want to run up my in-law's long-distance bill.
What does everyone have planned for New Year's Eve?
Labels: BEAUTIFUL PEACEFUL, WONDERFUL

Yesterday we stopped in quickly to see Grandma Marilyn and Grandpa & Grandma Whisler. We're sorry that our trips were so short, but we hope that by keeping them short we didn't spread too many of our yucky germs. We love you guys and wished we could have stayed longer!
Well today we're running around trying to fnish up the last Christmas preparations. Tonight we're having our friends the Springers over with their 3 boys like we did last year. We are having Mexican food again, doing another pinata, decorating the boy's cookies for Santa and enjoying time with friends. Since neither of us have family here it's nice to spend time with other people you care about.
Hope everyone has a wonderful day and that tomorrow is fantastic as well!

This morning I awoke to an hour, I would have thought unnecessarily early due to a very active child inside of me. Â I couldn't sleep. Â My mind kept turning. Â I kept thinking about how we've always been so blessed, how I've always felt so rich, in a number of ways. Â 

Justin and I decided to do stockings for each other, for Christmas morning, I thought it sounded like fun (hopefully he does too). :) So I wanted to make some for us, in case we find our family having more members some day, then I could make however many we needed, and we'd all have the same stockings. Well anyway, I found this really cute fabric in the Debbie Mumm collection at Joann's, and made these. The shape is off the stockings mom made for Blake and I years ago, I just changed it a little. I think they turned our pretty good. :) Mine in the middle picture (or on the right in the pic of the two together). See - my snowgirl has eyelashes. :) love Alicia
Christmas is a time of JOY
A time for love and cheer.
A time for making meories
to last throughout the year.
May your Christmas season be filled with JOY
Love, The Ellis Family

Justin hanging the candy canes
Us in front of the tree
Tree with lights. We bought some cool new lights, they are garland style, so they have three bulbs close together, instead of 1 bulb ever few inches. It made it really light and bright.
How it all looks together.
Up close of the nativity
Tree in the dark.
Nutcrackers and nativity. Kind of looks like the nutcrackers are standing guard over the nativity. I have a couple more nutcrackers, but they're upstairs.
Here's the finished tree. We don't have a topper yet, I haven't been able to find one that I like and that fits the style of our tree. Some years there are a dozen ones that I like, this year - not so much. Oh well. I think the tree turned out great. :) Its one of the fullest natural/nonfarm raised trees we've ever seen. I was worried we'd end up with a charlie brown style tree, but Justin found this one, and I think its a really good tree. 
(But you know what I'd love to find? A copy of "The Northridge Elementary Choir's Christmas concerts" from 1989-1990. Anyone? Anyone?)

Joanna:
Cory:
"All of the James Bond movies that they show on TV during Christmas time" (I'm not sure they're Christmas movies....but whatever works for ya!)
So tonight I needed to take a treat to Young Women's and I made a double batch of my favorite recipe for Chocolate Chip Cookies (from the Better Homes and Gardens classic cook-book). I added one bag of milk chocolate chips, and one bag of butterscotch - just for my hubby. As I finished making them I remembered that I needed a dessert to take to our big Relief Society Christmas party tomorrow night too and that I'd bought the stuff to make these tasty looking pretzels. So instead of eating a bunch of cookies tonight, and then eating a bunch of the hug pretzels tomorrow too I decided to kill 2 birds with one stone and get them both done today while the boys were sleeping. The hug pretzels turned out so yummy looking (they're cooling in the fridge). Since I'm trying to be good and not eat myself into a Santa suit I hope I can resist enough that we can still have enough for the Relief Society party.


My sad lemon trees have never recovered from being with the tomatoes this summer. Any tips????
Ok from the front, not so much from the back :)

