Keeping Up With the Smiths: Our first Christmas!

So, a year ago this Christmas day Harrison surprised me in my East Asian apartment and proposed! I was beyond shocked and still find myself wondering how did I get so lucky to marry him every day. So now, having been married for almost 5 months we were able to celebrate our first Christmas of being married and having to split our time between the families. And what a joy our Christmas has been this year!

Our first Christmas cards!

Decorating our house with Christmas cheer began early since we celebrated Thanksgiving early....
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, we went Christmas tree scouting to compare prices around town and there is a produce/plant store less than a block away from our house that we went by to see. We had bought mums and pumpkins there in the fall and love supporting our local community, but knowing how much traveling we would do we thought they would be too expensive. Once we arrived we met the owner and began explaining our story when asked what he could do to get us to buy a tree, haha. So, he knocked $15 off the tree price and all of a sudden our first stop in our tree shopping led us to committing to one!
Now, the best part was that since we lived so close, one of the workers walked our tree to our house for us!!! Now if that isn't a sight rarely seen in America!

He walked it all the way up to our front porch for us!

Our tree stayed undecorated until about the 10th of December after our trip to Selma for Collins' birth and a wedding

In addition to a tree, I also got crafty for many of our around the house items, such as our Christmas wreath...

This wreath I made with wired ribbon, pins, and a crafting wreath, all from Michaels!

I also made a Christmas tree skirt and our first family STOCKINGS!!!

Here is the tree skirt! I used felt, buttons and quilting stuffing. Drew the trees on paper and then used them as templates to cute the trees all out.

Here's an up close of the trees....

The stockings I made all from scratch.... using different color felts, snowflake sequins, buttons and small ornament type beads. I will do a later blog on these....

So far, we have had 5 family Christmas gatherings, all of which have been such a treat, having been away from family Christmas for 2 years.
First, we had Christmas with Harrison's parents and brother and sister in law. This I had the overwhelming joy of hosting myself!!! Got to put all my Christmas China to use!!! That was by far my favorite part!

We celebrated with Harrison's immediate family on a Friday night, then we did Christmas together just me and Harrison on Saturday morning!

Santa came early!

We even had our Christmas morning breakfast that my mom has made every year!

sausage swirl biscuits! My favorite! And so easy to make!

Then Saturday night we had Christmas with all of the Smiths, dirty santa style! I got a target gift card and Harrison a chick fil a gift card so we definitely racked up!
After the family get together we went to Lights on the Neuse for a hay ride through a Christmas farm!

Lindsey also joined us for the weekend!

We also had a tacky Christmas sweater party with the youth on Sunday and Harrison and I were once again dressed from Memaw's closet along with several other youth who borrowed clothes from us!

Then, on Thursday we were off for Christmas in Bama. Here we had Christmas with all of the Bambergs on Sunday and then Christmas morning with all of my family (10 people all staying under one roof) and another great helping of Christmas morning breakfast and she crab soup Christmas Eve!

Harrison and I made a gingerbread house rom scratch using cookie cutters and cookie mix. Of course it fell in because we didn't cook the cookies until they were crisp. Now we'll know for next time!