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We had such a nice holiday season this year now that Maya has grown up a bit. It started the week after Thanksgiving, when my parents were in town, and we all headed out to pick out our Christmas tree. I had hoped to go to a tree farm this year and actually cut one down ourselves, but it was rainy all weekend, so we decided that wouldn’t be all that much fun. So we picked one out from a lot near our house and headed home to decorate.

Maya loved putting ornaments on the tree, but the month our tree was up, she also loved taking them off. So off and on they would go. Amazingly only one ornament broke this year, and it had nothing to do with Maya. So she was good at being gentle!

We took her to visit Santa in Sundance Square again this year with another family who we’ve gone with the last couple years. And the kiddo was so brave! She was excited to be going to see Santa, and kept excitedly pointing at him while we waited in line. When it was our turn, she walked right up the steps to his sleigh and sat down beside him. She was really stoney faced the entire time she sat there, but she wasn’t scared or sad and was really happy afterward. She gave him a high five as she was leaving. So she’s kept up the tradition of not giving us any of the “typical” Santa photos with the screaming child! All season she would point and yell, “Santa!” every time she saw him somewhere, so that was a lot of fun to see.

Christmas weekend we headed to Shreveport, where we had a nice time relaxing and eating, mostly! The day of Christmas Eve we checked out Shreveport’s science museum, and Maya had fun there. She made her first snowflake and sat in a chair that took her for a ride up high in the sky.

Unfortunately, on Christmas Day she woke up feeling really terrible. She ended up with a pretty bad cold and cough that lasted for several days, and then of course I caught it from her and am still fighting it off today. So neither of us felt great, but we still had a nice time. Luckily she felt well enough to go over to Sandi’s house that night for the celebration with all of Jason’s extended family. She had a good time playing with Caroline and Camryn, so I’m glad she was able to tough it out for a little bit at least!

We took our tree down this last weekend, and Maya was really sad to see it go! It sat on our curb for a few days waiting for the city to come pick it up, and she kept saying “bring Maya’s Christmas tree back inside.” So I felt bad about that! But hopefully I convinced her that Santa needs to take it back to the North Pole until next year.

Here are some photos from our trip to Shreveport. The terrible thing about this year is I managed to erase our memory card, thinking I had downloaded all of the photos from it. But I didn’t. So all of our Santa photos, along with some others are gone. We have the one Santa photo they printed out for us there, so I’ll scan that in eventually. But of course it’s not as good as the ones Jason had taken. So we’ll just have to keep this etched in our memory! And I’m afraid this batch of photos is pretty bad too! I must not have been too into taking pics this week or something!