Traditions

One of my favorite things about having my own family during the holidays is starting our own traditions. Our first Christmas as a family, we were living 700 miles away from any family and we were going to Iowa and then North Carolina for a 3 week long Christmas vacation, so we knew we shouldn't go to crazy buying Christmas decorations for our apartment since we weren't even going to be there for most of December. Plus, we didn't exactly have hundreds of dollars to spend on that anyway. But we did go out and buy a little fake tree, some red and gold balls and started the tradition of each of us picking out one new ornament a year. It wasn't much to start, but this is our 6th year of doing that, and each year I pick up a decoration or two for the house, and now we have enough to decorate our house AND the entire tree in one of a kind ornaments picked out just by us each year.

This was the first year we didn't put any other ornaments on our tree (except for a couple small Swedish ones we picked up while in Sweden in 2009) and every single ornament on our tree is one of a kind (in our house anyway!) and super special to us. 

This year was our first time (obviously) taking Tindra to pick out an ornament and Jasper's 6th!! time! Such a special family memory that I can't wait to experience every year!