Our Christmas Village

The year Ray & I got engaged, we decided to begin a Christmas village. Every year, we add something new to it. It's a fun tradition that has been ongoing since 2002. We always try and find some way to incorporate an event that happened throughout the year so we have a fun way to remember it. For instance, the year we got engaged it was a bridal shop, the year we got married was a church, and the year we had Nicholas it was a toy store, and the year Nicholas started school, it was a school. Every year, we go down to Shopko after Thanksgiving and pick out our newest addition to our village & some accessories to go with it. This year, Nicholas picked out the newest piece for our village, The Conover Estate. Sean picked out some cool looking trees, I picked out some newspaper stands, & Ray picked out a scene with bears around an old cabin (which was perfect since he has spent so much time working on the basement and it's going to be a outdoors theme.) The boys had a blast watching Ray & I put up the village & then we let them add the trees. As you can tell from the pictures, we had to do a little rearranging with the trees...straight lines just don't work to hide the cords! This is our special family tradition that we do & it just seems like the Christmas season is here when our village is up.