It's the holiday season!

One of my favorite days of the year is the day after Thanksgiving! It symbolizes the start of the holidays and I just love everything about it - even the rush of shoppers at 4am (not that I've ever participated at that ridiculous hour however for the first time ever I did make it to Target at 6:30am this year to pick up the Disney Princess Vanity for Miss Maggie - shhhhhh!).

Growing up, we'd go cut down our Christmas tree the morning after Thanksgiving every single year. Rain or shine! We'd go with my cousins & aunt/uncle to the same tree farm and go to breakfast. It is a special tradition I hold close to my heart. Jeremy and I committed the 1st Christmas sin and have a fake tree (for now at least!) so we have bypassed that tradition but I look forward to picking it back in in years to come.

So now that we're not freezing are tooshies off in a tree farm on this day, we have a new tradition. We take the kids downtown to see Santa and catch some of the Macy's parade. In years past, we'd be standing in line for Santa (for 2 hours) and catch the parade as it went by. For the past few years, we've been fortunate enough to have a "hook-up" and get to go by appointment to a VIP Santa in the upper floors at Nordstrom. I have to tell you it is heavenly! The kids did so great sitting on Santa's lap. I was very nervous about Maggie - she's hit & miss but she did a fantastic job. After Santa we did a little shopping and then went on the carousel at Westlake.

Once we were home, we got out the Christmas decorations and holidayized our house. We are now fully immersed in Christmas cheer and I'm loving it! It really doesn't matter to me what we do on the day after Thanksgiving, as long as I'm kicking off the holiday season with my family, I'm a happy girl!

The "real" Santa photo arrived today and I'm thrilled with it!

Macy's has a wonderful program where in the stores you'll see these "Believe" mailboxes and a letter writing station. For every letter that is dropped into the box, they'll donate $1 to Make-A-Wish. I love this campaign!

We couldn't believe that at 1pm on it's first day, there was virtually no line for the carousel.