our christmas favourites: toys and decorations

we've been keeping ourselves busy around here. we had some fantastic visitors for the past 4 days and had a blast eating out and enjoying some good conversation together. 

but it is december first {already!} and i think most of our decorations are up so i thought i'd share with you what we're doing this year in terms of christmas decoration.

we bought all the christmas decorations/tree/ornaments last year while here in africa, so there hasn't been a need to buy any more this year. i've kept things pretty simple and used what i already had to christmasify things here.

we're doing our advent envelopes again {stay tuned for my post on our favourite traditions} so i hung them up this year with red yarn and clothes pins. i also used red yarn to hang some christmas cards that we've received. our stockings are hung and our tree is up. i let the boys decorate however they wanted this year although after repeatedly dropping some of the glass ornaments, i had to direct jude's ornament-hanging to the plastic/non-breakable ones. 

we purchased some ornament sets that we'll likely sell before we leave here {that are lovely, but generic}, but there are some beautiful and unique handmade ornaments that i'll hang onto for our future christmas trees.

i've set up our wood-carved nativity set on top of the bookshelf in the living room and my new soap stone nativity on the buffet in the dining room. 

tomorrow's advent activity is to pick out a nativity set from the christmas market we'll be going to - i have my eye on a sweet banana fiber one but we'll see what's there. 

the boys loved when i pulled out their little people nativity set a couple weeks ago and have played with it pretty much every day since. i've also let them play with the santa hat we have here as well. noah insisted on wearing it for the first few days. 

and they were so excited when i pulled out all the christmas books they have forgotten about. 

so we've kept things simple and even though the house is in a perpetual state of mess, at least it's a christmasey mess. right?