Less is more

This year I breaking out of my normal Christmas mold.

How many of you send out Christmas cards?
Look for the perfect coordinating wrapping paper, ribbons and bows?
Love to have all the presents wrapped and under the tree for weeks before Christmas?
Or just do certain things at Christmas because you feel you HAVE to?

Well I love and usually do all 3 of those but this year have decided not to.

I have recently read Jill Savage's book " Living with less so your family has more" and just read half of it for the second time this week.  It has really made me think a lot and makes me want to get rid of half of our stuff and live a lot more simple than we do.  ( the book Seven made me want to do the same thing, I think its time I read that one again as well.)  More on the book later, but I have decided to focus on what really matters this season.  Spend more intentional time with my family and less money and less stressing about the things that really don't matter.  For many of you those items above may not stress you out and I envy you for that ( I clearly have other issues to work on as well, haha) but I always find something to stress about so I'm focusing on keeping more things that I REALLY don't have to do off the to-do list that's  I feel is never ending.

 I love having a theme or color scheme for my wrapping paper and all the ribbons and bows,  but I found myself spending way too much time  trying to find the perfect stuff that matched our tree and realized it was stressing me out and stupid so I bought character themed paper for the boys and a few random rolls of other paper for everything else and called it a day! Then with Christmas cards I kept thinking of what poses we should do and what outfits we would all wear and realized we could save the money and the time and just not do them!  Do I feel like I'm slacking in a way, yeah I do, but it doesn't matter, my boys aren't going to remember how fun it was taking pictures for our annual Christmas card or how cute the card mom picked out in 2012 was.  However they will remember the time we spent with them watching Christmas movies, looking at lights, reading Christmas stories , and other actitivities that will make lasting memories.

My goal this year is to slow down, relax and just enjoy this season with our boys.  Noah is at such a fun age and I want to start creating traditions and memories for him that he looks forward too and not remember his mom being a grouchy, stressed out mess each Christmas season.