Getting Our Christmas On

Wow, it's been a really, really long time since I've posted anything. It's been pretty crazy around here; we're still trying to get everything unpacked and get the house all pretty-looking, and then Thanksgiving came and snuck up on us, and now all of a sudden it's Christmas!

Actually, I've put a lot of the unpacking/prettifying things on hold to at least get the living room looking like Christmas around here. And we've spent a good amount of time doing Christmas-y stuff like driving around looking at lights, going to see Santa, and watching far too many Christmas movies. We still need to make cookies, but we can't do that too far in advance or they'll all be gone before we can leave any out for Santa.

A couple of things we attempted to do but failed were going to the Holidazzle parade and to Macy's Santaland. I've lived in Minnesota my entire life and I've never done either. The Holidazzle  parade is well, a parade - outside, in Minnesota, in the middle of December. Yes, that is as crazy as it sounds. Regardless, we still (halfheartedly) tried to go this year, but we didn't factor in just how many people would be there, or how hard it would be to find a parking spot. We took this as a sign (maybe just a sign of poor planning, but still a sign that we were not meant to stand outside freezing, watching a parade in the middle of winter!).

Well, since we were already in Minneapolis, and we had eventually found a parking spot somewhat near Macy's, we decided to check out Santaland. I'd love to tell  you more about it, but I can't because I've never seen it.

When we first walked into the store we found a little station where you could write a letter to Santa and put it into the postal box. Super cute and Riley loved it, he wrote a letter for himself and one for Ava. Then we began walking around the store, and walking and walking. Seriously, this store was huge! And all we wanted to do was find Santa! Finally, we figured out that he was on the eight floor.

So, then we had to find the elevators, shouldn't be that hard, right? Apparently Macy's likes to hide their elevators (and bathrooms). Eventually we found the line for the elevators and waited. And waited some more. Then we got on, and then about thirty more people did too. Then we started going up until we got to the fifth floor, then the doors opened and an employee yelled into the elevator that whoever wanted to see Santa had to get off here. We stepped out and saw the longest line I have ever seen in my life. And we were still three floors away from Santaland!

That's when we turned around and left. We were all a little disappointed, but nobody wanted to spend the rest of the night standing in that line.

We have, however visited Santa at other places, three times in fact. The first two times were practice runs to let Ava get used to him, so we could avoid a similar picture to last year's:

This year she did awesome! This is what she does when we ask her to smile, we call it her "Popeye face":

I'm pretty happy with the picture we ended up with. I think we'll do some practice runs next year too.

I'm not sure why this scan looks so weird.

If you have kids, do you do practice runs with them meeting Santa? Have you been to Santaland, is it worth the line?