We have had a lot of fun the last few weeks celebrating Christmas time in our own way. A part of it has been lonely not anticipating a fun trip to Salt Lake like last year full of Christmas traditions, but we have done little things to make it special. Thatcher has been helping me a lot in the kitchen. He wanted to make candy cane cookies, so we did that. He has also helped me to make other things like ginger cookies, chocolate cookies with candy cane kisses on top (9 dozen of them! I took them to a cookie exchange and they won the prize for prettiest cookie). We have done some fun activities like m&m wreaths, and paper trees, we made our own snow globe, and we made a tree with decorations out of felt. Thatcher gets excited about everything we do so it has motivated me to find some ideas for celebrating the season.
We also made gingerbread houses with graham crackers. We made Thatchers and once James had completely devoured it (it took a few days of very hard work), we decorated James's and then the boys did the same on that one. I was pretty impressed that they managed to eat every last bit of both houses. 
My mind is drawing a blank on other things we did to celebrate. Each day the boys would get a treat out of the advent calendar until a week before Christmas when James just couldn't handle it any more and ate all the candies that were left. We also kept track of the days until Christmas with a cottonball beard we built for Santa. Eugene the Elf was a fun tradition we officially started this year (he never got named last year and Thatcher was a little too young to understand). Eugene did some funny things like flying from the ceiling fan and the boys loved finding him in different places around the house.
We read Christmas stories every night and Ty converted the boys to 'Silent Night'. If you try to sing anything else to them at bedtime you will be rudely interrupted and told to sing 'Silent Night' instead. Thatcher embraced everything Christmas we shared with him and he loved learning about Jesus and playing with the "activities" (what he calls nativities).
At our ward Christmas party James spent the majority of the evening trying to eat all the butter, and Thatcher spent the majority of the evening in the nativity room looking at different nativity scenes and watching a short movie on the birth of Christ. I tried to get him to go to Mrs. Claus's story time or the craft room where they made decorations, but all he wanted to do was look at the baby Jesus. I thought that was pretty sweet.
Ty and I got to celebrate in other ways. We had a nice night at the Coconino County Bar Association's Christmas party where Ty was voted in as President. I also went to a fun Christmas craft night, an ugly Christmas sweater themed Bunco night, a cookie exchange where I left with a ton of really great treats, and I helped plan and put on our Relief Society Christmas dinner that was a mediocre success. I also helped teach a special Christmas lesson with the rest of the presidency the week before Christmas. It was a super busy month to say the least, but all the Christmas activities helped me to be a little less homesick for my family.
We got a big snow storm a couple weeks before Christmas and the boys played for a long time with their dad in the snow. They sled and built a snowman with chocolate cookie eyes.
I am so grateful for my kids to help make Christmas magical again. Without them it would just be a lot of decorating, baking, and party planning, with no one to really make it meaningful (and force me to stay in the 'nativity room' all night thinking about the Savior instead of all the other less important things).
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