My Top 10 Things to do this Holiday Season

1. Try to make my own Christmas cards. How many will depend on how many scrapbooking supplies I have.

2. Sit by the fireplace. I haven't experienced real cold in 7 years. I plan on drinking lots of tea & cocoa by the fire all winter long.

3. Making Christmas gifts. This may be baking, cooking, involve scrapbooking, or if I run out of ideas, I'll be giving out the pickles we canned this fall.

4. Experiencing the events up here on the mountain, parades, bazaars, festivals, whatever there is up here in the middle of nowhere.

5. Watching lots of Christmas movies with the kids. Besides Snoopy and It's A Wonderful Life...any ideas?

6. Scrapbooking! I miss it, have lots of space, could find time to do it, but I'm out of supplies. I haven't bought anything new for a few years so I could use up older stuff. Now I need papers and adhesives and albums.

7. Listen to Christmas music. My favorite is Transiberian Orchestra's CDs, but if I'm in a mellow mood, I've got a few Manheim Steamroller CDs too.

8. Find a church event to attend so I can meet new people. I think I'll go to the tea they're doing mid-November.

9. Do something at the house for our homeschool group, maybe host a hang-out, game night for gr. 7 - 12 so older kids have something to do too.

10. Cook a Mexican Christmas menu (even if it's the week before Christmas dinner). I love tamales, enchiladas, real rice & beans, etc.

Halloween weekend

We've never celebrated Halloween in our household. When I was growing up, I did, but I wasn't a Christ-follower then, and neither were my parents. Tim grew up as a Jehovah's Witness when he was in elementary school. When we got married and had kids, Tim said that he didn't want our kids to celebrate it, I researched the origins, and realized that if my faith was important to me, I didn't want to celebrate it either. Over the years we've asked the kids how they feel about it and although it would be fun to dress up, which they did throughout the year for other events anyway, they really didn't feel like they were missing out. They enjoyed getting home just before trick or treating hours were over, sneak into the dark house by the back door, unseen. They they'd "spy" on the neighborhood kids and comment on what costumes were creative, popular, and unexpected.

What we usually do on Oct. 31st is launch our holiday season. I usually take the kids out for a breakfast-supper at IHOP or Denny's. Then we discuss what we want to do for the holidays: menus, gifts, what we'll make for others, any volunteering we'll do, etc.

This year we're sharing a house with Tim's parents and for the past 6 years (it started when Tim's cousin Rachel lived here and did Halloween with her son Darren), they've handed out candy. There's about 30 kids that make a point to stop here they tell me, so they hand out candy. Knowing this, we decided maybe we'd try just handing out candy with Mom this year.

To hand out the candy, Jordan & Logan wanted to know if they could dress up as 80s rockers. Tim & I talked it over and agreed they could. At this age, dressing up isn't going to change their whole faith and belief system. They got all decked out, even invited their 2 friends that live nearby to stay overnight. They were ready.

Concho, AZ isn't officially a city, or even an official town. It's a community, maybe a village, whatever you want to call it, but there's no city government, no one to decide on what hours or even what DAY to go trick or treating. Everything here is run as just part of Apache County. We all played a few games of Monopoly, first the adults, then the boys. All night we waited, from about 5 - 9:30 pm, and no one came - not a single kid. Our kids were so disappointed. Their hoping they come tonight. Up here, there's a lot of Mormon families and they celebrate all holidays that fall on a Sunday - on Saturday, to keep Sunday holy. So we thought they'd come last night. Maybe since the closest 2 or 3 towns did big city-wide events last night on Saturday, maybe the kids here will come trick or treating tonight so they get to do both. There's a K-8 school within walking distance from our house, so we know there's lots of kids to potentially come here.

If they do come tonight...we'll be ready for them.