It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

After Gordon and Katrina's family left (after Thanksgiving), we decided to pull out the Christmas decorations and put up the tree!  We all love this time of year!

Sadly, after putting the tree together, Briant accidently plugged the tree lights into the wrong plug with the wrong voltage, and the lights slowly burnt out.  We've had this tree for 9 years so some of the lights were going out on us anyway.  So we ran to the store the next day after picking Briant up from work, and got some battery powered lights that I loosely strung around the tree.  They work and the tree looks the same!

It's always fun to pull out the ornaments we haven't seen in over a year!  We haven't seen them since they left Angola and went into storage while we were in Virginia.
And of course we love the Christmas hats.  :)
Putting the ornaments up with the kids is the first stage.  The second stage is rearranging them when the kids go to school.  ;)

And it was Thomas' turn to put up the star this year.

After finishing the tree, Thomas found a Christmas karaoke website that they sung along to.  This picture doesn't show it just they were just warming up, but they ended up singing quite a few songs at the top of their lungs before Briant and I were ready for them to go to bed.  ;)

The next weekend, the International Women's Organization put on a Christmas bizarre at the Riga Town Hall, to help raise money for their favorite charity organizations.  A lot of the embassies from all over the world stationed here in Riga participated, including the U.S. embassy.  Here are some of the women that helped to organize the event and here they are selling the cookies and American goods that many of us helped to make and donate.  From left to right: Jamie, the ambassador Nancy Pettit, Cece, Kendra, Cherylyn, and Stephanie. 

On the second floor, they had school groups entertain and add to the Christmas cheer by singing.

Here are some kids from our school's 3rd and 4th grades singing with the help of the music teacher, Mr. Joyce.  Rhea's in there somewhere.  ;)

View from the 2nd floor--different countries sold food and drinks, art, cosmetics, pottery, clothes, etc.

A fun morning!  We had to leave around noon to take Thomas to the church for a Super Saturday activity.  It was an activity that took the kids through a Hebrew village after they heard about someone's trip to Israel.  Perfect time of year for that activity!

This is a wonderful time of year that gives us more opportunities to focus on the Savior's birth while trying to do a little more service for others as he would have us do (all year of course!).  I always appreciate the increase of energy, parties, and do-gooding that goes on in our communities and the world at large.  I especially love seeing my own kids get excited about helping others and really understanding why we're serving them.  In particular, their international school has provided a few opportunities to give to other kids like The Angel Tree to help kids that are in the hospital long-term and The Shoebox project that donates toys to kids refugee camps.  They insisted that we help with both causes and were excited throughout the process of planning, shopping, and wrapping.  I was glad to hear that they wanted to donate some of their own allowance money as well to buying these gifts.  Briant and I had to pull the reins in though when they wanted to buy them everything!  "But mom, it's 40% off!"  ;)  Here they are taking the gifts in before school.