Christmas, pictures, santa and stuff

December has come and gone and with it so has Lily’s first birthday (a separate post to come) and Christmas. These events have brought up a lot of emotion and some questions. Mainly about Santa and weather or not we are going to tell Lily that Santa is a real magical guy or something else. This is something that Waldo and I have talked about since before Lily was born. Waldo remembers his brother breaking the news to him that Santa isn’t real (sorry to burst anyone’s bubbles) when he was about 4 years old and I don’t actually remember believing in Santa ever really. I don’t think that our non-belief in Santa hindered either of us in our childhoods and then there’s the whole issue of lying to Lily which I just don’t really want to do. It’s funny we know that we will just tell Lily the truth about my Mom being a lesbian. It wasn’t a decision that we had to make, we just knew that we wouldn’t lie or try to skirt the subject, like some people we know. So then why is this whole Santa thing harder for us? The only decision that I have come to about Santa is Lily looked really cute being held by him in front of our tree this year.

Christmas 09

********

Since Lily’s birthday is three days before Christmas I was having a hard time deciding if I wanted to send out Christmas cards or first birthday photo cards. Then my friend Starr (Gramma Starr) gave Lily a beautiful princess Christmas dress so Christmas cards it was. One weekend we went and bought a Christmas tree and wreath fixings and rented a Santa suit (more on that in a second) and set up a whole scene in our kitchen and went to work. I took like 294 pictures over the course of the weekend. I’m no professional and all I have is a couple year old Sony point and shoot but I was pretty pleased with a lot of the pictures. Lily was a champ and posed for hours.

This is one of my favorites
Christmas 09

This was Lily first taste of sugar, it happened totally by accident. We gave her the candy cane thinking that the thin wrapper would keep her clean. We didn’t take into account how sharp her teeth are.
Christmas 09

The scene we created on our kitchen table
Christmas 09

Christmas 09

A couple weeks before our Christmas photo shoot I was telling Waldo that we were going to have to brave the mall one day soon to get Lily’s picture with Santa. He laughed and said that there was no way that Lily would let Santa hold her so (totally jokingly) just rent a suit and I’ll play Santa. He didn’t expect me to run with it. I showed him. I asked on facebook if anyone in our area knew where I could rent a Santa suit and was told to call the local costume rental place. For $25 we got the suit for 24 hours. It was money well spent. We had planned on taking some funny Santa pictures like Santa with his head in the oven but ran out of time.

When we were taking pictures I thought it would be great to do a picture with Lily standing up holding Santa’s hands. Waldo just put the jacket and the gloves on and for some reason it freaked Lily out big time. I was really surprised because she could still see her Daddy’s face.

Christmas 09

The next day Waldo let Lily play with the jacket and wig for like two hours before he put them on and then she watched him as he got dressed. She was much more comfortable with Santa this time.

We tried taking some pictures in front of the tree as a family but we had lost all daylight by then so I wasn’t happy with any of the pictures.

Christmas 09

Christmas 09

Christmas 09

*******

Christmas was a nice quiet event at our house this year. We woke up and opened our gifts and then Jack came over for a while. I made dinner for everyone and that was our day. We didn’t very many pictures somehow.

Christmas 09

Christmas 09

Christmas 09

This little car was a birthday gift
Christmas 09

Christmas 09

It’s funny to remember that Christmas day 2008 we were bringing our 3 day old baby girl home from the hospital. Crazy what a difference 365 days makes.

**edited to add: It was the Christmas pictures that I was hinting at here.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

4 thoughts on “Christmas, pictures, santa and stuff

  1. Mark and I had quite a few talks about how we will deal with Santa in the years to come. Being a parent is hard :/

    Oh, I love Lily’s Christmas dress!

  2. Love these photos!

    I get the whole Santa myth dilemma. I have no idea how long we’ll keep it up nor how we’ll tell our kids. Ugh…

    Sending you love and happy, wonderful, new year wishes.

  3. The first picture with you and Lily – wow, you both look so beautiful! I like them all, but that’s one of my faves!! Also impressed by your kitchen table scene! I need you to do a photo shoot for us…

    • Existere, that is my favorite too. I love it. And thanks for the compliments, I can’t take all the credit Waldo helped a bunch too but it was my idea. 🙂 I would totally do a photo shoot for you guys. We need to figure out how to teleport or something because I don’t think Lily would be very happy about a flight.

Leave a Reply to Colleen Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This blog is kept spam free by WP-SpamFree.