Counting Down

It is getting harder and harder to wait for Christmas! Look at all our presents!

I'm so glad we open gifts on Christmas Eve! Some of these presents have been sitting under the tree for almost a month and it's beginning to drive me crazy!!
I've been such a good girl this season and haven't been snooping around the presents. Well, not snooping around the presents as much as usual anyway.
I know exactly where David hid my presents before wrapping them and I never even opened the closet. Although I did have my hand on the doorknob once or twice. But I didn't turn it. You can't really expect me to not know what any of the presents under the tree are, as I can't go all cold turkey and not even touch them, so I know there are a couple spiral bound books and something that comes in one of those large plastic cases that are skinny up at the top and then the item is down toward the bottom. The present I am most confounded by is this large flexible-looking (David yelled for me to stop in my tracks when he saw me headed toward it) rectangle. It's very thin and I almost thought it was one of those desk-blotter-calendar things, but why on earth would I get one of those, since I can't even see the top of my desk anyway.
We've come a long way since our first Christmas here. Although it seems there are fewer presents under this year's tree (or maybe it's because we've graduated to a bigger tree?) if you look carefully at this (low quality, sorry) picture, you might see we had only 12 ornaments in 2005! (We started out with 3, and luckily my family sent out a few more to fill it out!)

We added to our collection and ended up with these ornaments at the beginning of 2006:

And this year before decorating, we had this many:

I love our growing collection of Christmas decorations. I love my new green sparkly tree & golden sleighs. I love my nutcrackers and red and green balls-in-a-bowl. I even love the candles and candle holders I keep getting as Christmas gifts from my students. But most of all, I LOVE my Christmas tree.