Just The Two Of Us: Our Texas Holidays

I'm excited that the Holidays are officially here! Christmas is my favorite time of year. Since it only comes once a year, it is very special to me. I love being able to see family and loved ones and celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.

We love making new holiday memories in Texas. During the past few months, we celebrated Collin's birthday, Thanksgiving, and now Christmastime. Right before Collin's birthday, we took our family pictures. This year, we added our sweet dog Chloe. My good friend Hailey from our ward took our pictures using our Canon camera. Even though Chloe kept moving around and looking away from the camera, they still turned out so cute! Not to mention it was also super cold that day... We love the way they looked on our Christmas cards this year.

Our first family photo with Chloe. :)

Blooper picture. This is what I mean about taking photos with dogs...

It was so hard to hold that sign because of the wind... Luckily, we got a decent picture.

This is probably my favorite photo! It only took one try!

Hey, he said he wanted to keep warm this winter. ;)

Best Christmas gift of all!

Collin's birthday is on November 20th, which is always close to Thanksgiving. His birthday fell on a Sunday this year, so it was a pretty low key day. I made him breakfast early that morning since we have 8:30 church. We went to church for 3 hours. After church, I started preparing Collin's birthday dinner. We ended up eating meatloaf with mashed potatoes. I'd say it turned out pretty good overall. We had friends come over from our ward to wish him a happy birthday. It was a great turnout! We had fun just mingling, eating cake and ice cream, and playing games.

This is what I made Collin for his birthday breakfast

One of our birthday guests. :) He is so good with babies!

Yep. I made that...

Singing Happy Birthday

I still can't believe he's 27!

On Thanksgiving, we once again stayed in Austin. We went to a social gathering in our ward and spent time with some good friends. We made broccoli casserole for the potluck. Special thanks to my amazing mom for sending me the recipe. :) Everyone loved it! The rest of the food was so delicious. We were pretty much in a food coma afterwords. It was a great day! What I loved the most was being able to reflect on what I am thankful for. Sometimes I worry about what I don't have that I forget about the things that I am blessed with. It was a great reminder for me.

This is what we made for the potluck.

Not complete without a snapchat filter.

I quickly got out the Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving. Normally, we would want to wait until December to decorate, but we couldn't wait! We felt prompted to start getting Christmas-y right away. It was fun getting out old (and new) decorations to put around our apartment.

Our holiday bouquet

Decorating the counter...

We had to put a red bow on our front door light

Winter Wreath

Garland and Nativity Scene

Tiny tree with a Christmas village.

It's like I said before, I love Christmas! The Christmas spirit was already in full swing in our home. We were listening to Christmas music, drinking hot chocolate, and wearing festive red and green colors. We also made Christmas cookies twice! We decorated the cookies with a few friends in our ward for FHE. The other time, we sent out the second batch of cookies to people we home/visit teach. We can't forget that we have been binge-watching Christmas movies.