"Tradition, Tradition!"

(Please sing the title to this post in your best Tevye voice.)

I decided this year that, although traditions are well and good, it seems like we have too many Christmas traditions. It's no good when your traditions stress you out. I think the Disneyland trip made us try to squash the rest of the traditions into too short of a time span. But anyway, we still had fun with them.

Every year we go up to Williams, Arizona, which is by the Grand Canyon, and ride the Polar Express and spend the night in a hotel. I love this tradition. But this year, it was marred by H's TERRIBLE cold. The child could not breathe and therefore, he could not sleep, and therefore, I could not sleep and J could not sleep, and therefore, we were a bit grumpy. But the train ride itself was really fun:

  

Okay, I can't figure out blogger's new interface and what it's doing to my pictures (which I keep trying to tile), but oh, well. Next tradition: Sweet and I went to the Nutcracker. We sat on the front row of the balcony this year so she could see better. It was really relaxing and fun and once again, she spent the majority of the performance planning which role she would take next year. 

And we made our annual gingerbread house. We tried not to let H touch too many pieces of the candy since his cold was till going full force.