Last Christmas, we gave Dan's grandmother another gift certificate to Schwans, a company that she uses a lot to stock her freezer with yummy dinners. But, we didn't want to just give her a piece of paper. So, I made a cardboard card and Dan wrote a poem for the inside. It took little effort, but made the gift a little more extra special!

The poem read:

Rudolph's nose is bright red,
   An undecorated Christmas tree is green.
It’s hard to say--you may have liked this gift
   A little more when you were a teen.
(At least, I remember adolescent Jim
   As the one who licked the stroganoff pot clean.)

We know this gift isn’t too original--
   For a while now, we’ve given you one each year.
But it’s something that you can use
   When your stomach screams at you, “Hey! Down here!”
With a gift card to Schwann’s
   You don’t even need to be a great budgeteer!

We know you like the Chicken Cordon Bleu,
   though Gourmet Pretzel Twists look so very fine.
Fajitas are tasty and meatloaf is good...
   There’s so many choices that we’d probably whine!
But what are we saying, this isn’t right!
   With a catalog full of yummy food, you can yell out “mine all mine!”

As you can see, there aren't any pictures of me. Dan's camera kicked the bucket and we lost a lot of Christmas photos.

We'll start off with getting the tree. It was SO cold, and we hiked all the way up to the farthest tree field. Of course, our perfect tree was in the last row the furthest back, so we got quite a workout that day. This year's decorations are new- I decided that I wanted to do a color-themed tree. Oh, the pictures of us are an update of the photo at the top of every page, taken several years ago at the same tree farm. Enjoy!

Photos are to follow.... we cut down our tree again this year (it was SOOOOO cold), scrapbook gifts were made, and an ultimate gift presentation to Dan's parents sharing our trip to Disney in May!

By the way, Dan got me a foot massager and it's great! I've used it three times today, and me feet are feeling great!

If the audio player doesn't work you can just download Christmas-2007.mp3. It's about 5 MB.

This past year I wanted to give my dad a gift card to eat in one of the restaurants at Disney World because it is something that he never does for himself when he is there. So, I decided to make a little book with a story to hold the gift certificate.

Since our first year as a couple, we have been saving a chunk off the bottom of our Christmas tree stump to make an ornament out of it. Originally I wanted to write special notes on the back of each one such as vacations or events. But, that is now kept in all of the scrapbooks!