Hambrick's 2015

The past couple of years I’ve felt like we are too rushed at Christmas time. I think having a December birthday party makes the holiday season extra busy for us and this year I wanted to really ENJOY our traditions and not feel like I was just “checking them off a list” ya know? We really, really love Christmas and I’m totally not one of those people who are against decorating before Thanksgiving! We went ahead and got our tree and had it fully up and decorated before Thanksgiving 🙂

The advantage of going so early was that there were TONS of trees to choose from and the cotton field was still unpicked! The cotton field by our house didn’t do cotton this year and we never did get around to finding another field to get some pics in so this was a win/win. Plus the kids and I met Zach there after work and we beat him there so we had time to play in the cotton 🙂

Once Daddy arrived it was tree time! We LOVE our annual tradition of picking and cutting our own tree at Hambrick’s Tree Farm. They are the nicest people and we always have such a great time! It’s funny how different the weather may be from year to year. This year it was more chilly than last but still not jacket-worthy! I was excited for this year because I knew Tess would enjoy running around with her brother and sister…and she did 🙂

My FAVORITE! I love, love, love this and told Lindsay when we took our family pics with her the next week that I wasn’t stressed over the sibling pic b/c worst case I had this awesome one I could use on our Christmas cards (spoiler alert: that shoot ended up being my fav EVER so we didn’t use this pic for the cards haha!). I do love this so much though, it’ll be framed in my house for sure somewhere. I think you can really just see each child’s personalities so well!

Very, very serious about finding the perfect tree 🙂

More concerned with stick gathering than tree hunting 😉

While we all LOVE huge trees our living room just isn’t cut out for a massive one. It’s the only negative about our living room. When we built our house I knew we were setting ourselves up for a tricky Christmas tree situation but we make it work and have learned that a 6’5″ tree is PERFECT. This year it worked out great that Kye was big enough to do most of the cutting, Zach has to be SUPER careful with his back (we are STILL dealing with a lot of issues from a wreck he had back in May 2014…I wish the dude’s insurance would get this junk handled so my husband can get his back right!!!) so it was a blessing that we have a strong son to take over the cutting the tree down reigns!