Fun days before Christmas

My husband's sweet thoughtfulness and intentionality with me and our family cause me to daily be grateful to the Lord for His provision of Matt for me.  Leading up to to Christmas this year, Matt made specific plans so that it would be a fun and memorable season.  Our adventures started with decorating the house for Christmas, including going to a Christmas tree farm to cut down our tree.  We miss living in Clemson and going to the Nicholson's farm, but we found a great tree farm near our house called May-lan Farms.  We all bundled up and walked around to find our tree and then enjoyed farm animals and fun picture opportunities.  Corrie tells everyone that they had "the biggest pig she's ever seen!" :)

Matt & Avery in front of the big pig

Avery the goat and Corrie the sheep (no spritual meaning applied...)

Our finished tree!

As usual, we traveled 3 weekends out of this month to see family for the holidays but we took the opportunity to do some fun outings, too.  We spent a weekend with my family in Columbia and visited Riverbanks Zoo one night to see all of their Christmas decorations and lights.  The zoo puts a lot of effort into making this special with fire pits and marshmellows, hot chocolate, the farm animals out, and Christmas music playing all throughout the zoo.  The girls had a great time, and so did the adults, although it was pretty cold.

 Bundled up at the zoo

On Monday night the week of Christmas, Matt took Corrie (Avery wasn't feeling well) on a Daddy/daughter date, which Corrie loved!  Tuesday night, he took us all out to a house in Mauldin that decorates more than the Griswald's.  There were about 200 people lined up in the yard of this house to see the Christmas decorations, drink hot chocolate, and eat popcorn while watching "The Grinch" on the side of their house!  We had a great time walking through this maze of lights.

Wednesday night, the girls and I did a Mommy/daughter date watching "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" while drinking hot chocolate with marshmellows and eating homemade sugar cookies that Corrie helped to make!

Our favorite outing of the season happened Christmas Eve morning.  Matt set up an opportunity for our family to serve in the city by passing out stockings stuffed with candy, apples, oranges, and playing cards, a turkey, and nicely packaged pancake mix to 7 underpriveleged families in Greenville.  We drove to their homes, got the girls and the items to deliver and were able to have good conversations with many of the families while meeting their children (3 to 8 in each family!) and giving them the gifts for Christmas.  Our desire was to teach Corrie that it really is better to give than to receive, and she did a great job in practicing this concept.  I gave her some fun Christmas stickers before we left and encouraged her to give them away to the children we met, which she did and loved it!  At one house we decided to leave her in the car, but she protested because she wanted to be able to give the kids stickers!  We were very proud of her and hope that these truths continue to resonate in her soul.

Matt and I started a tradition pre-kids of going out to dinner Christmas Eve since we're normally traveling the next day and don't want to have the clean-up hassle of a meal at home.  This year, we took the girls to Miyabi's Japanese Steakhouse for the first time and laughed at Corrie's reaction to the experience.  She was enthralled the whole time by the antics of our cook and really liked the food, too!  This was a special treat we'll definitely do again!

Corrie & Matt enjoying Miyabi's