Last year I wanted to try and add a little more to our already special St. Patrick's Day activities.  I decided that since Michael liked rice crispy treats and liked Lucky Charms, I would combine the two and make a delicious treat for the family.

This Christmas I'm all about keeping the decorating as simple as possible.  We've had this chandelier (I bought it for $35 through a Facebook yard sale group) for about two years now and have never decorated it.  The chandelier we had before looked like it came from the 80's, but I tried to make it look nice at Christmas time - it never worked.

Over the past several years it seems that every where you turn, you see something about Elf on the Shelf.  Let's be honest, those elves are creepy looking.  Plus who wants to clean up after the shenanigans that some of the elves do to the house?  Here's the alternative that we've been doing for the past two years.

I'm pretty excited about this.  The last four years we've been doing a Christmas book countdown which is always fun.  I decided last year, after I realized I had finally purchased just enough movies, that I could also do a Christmas movie countdown.

Last year Michael's school gave all the kids in his class this bag of "magic reindeer food" before they went on their Christmas break.  This is such a great idea to get the kids excited for Santa coming to the house.

Even though the books have been wrapped for about two weeks, I'm just now getting around to writing about this year's countdown the night before.  This has become a really fun tradition for us and with Michael loving books even more, I see this lasting for several more years.