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10 years of Christmas Lights pages... its hard to believe that time actually goes by that fast!

 

The first Christmas Pic of the season... Our neighbor's house: October 8th.

The first display in the store was at Target in Bellevue, on October 26th.

After Halloween, Wallgreens had a section of stuff dedicated to Christmas, that slowly got larger as the season went on.

On November 10, the lights started going up where I work...

The day after Thanksgiving, we put up our tree, and the little guy helped this year

On November 30th, the lights around our neighborhood were becoming more and more common

The little guy met the "Bad guy who stole all the Christmas Lights"  He talked about it for weeks.

our church put up the trees and decorations on Dec 6, the start of Advent.

The North Bend train station looked very nice this year.

This espresso stand in town went all out

More neighborhood pics

We went down to the Festival of Lights parade in Montesano... what a great tradition!

The Honor Guard starts the parade, followed by the local National Guard unit, just back from the MidEast

I really like it that the town puts these lights up every year...

One of the school busses was dressed up for the parade...

There were 5 or 6 Santa's in the parade...

Not as many Caroling floats as I remember

The pirate ships were back again... because nothing says Christmas like Pirates

The Thriftway put their shopping cart back in the parade... it was absent last year

The Pipe Organ was playing loudly once again, too...

The Monte band either didn't all show, or they've really gone down hill...

  The dump truck was as impressive as ever!  No fireworks this year (they got in a lot of trouble), but a lot more lights.

The Cement truck wowed the crowd once again!

The Tractor pulling the Yule Log to the city square to be bucked and split for the bonfire ended the parade, as always

After the parade, we drove through some of the parade of houses route... very impressive! 
The town REALLY gets into decorating for Christmas

We ended our parade at the Living Nativity Scene, and then went to join everyone else at the
Family "After the FOL" Christmas Party

Good times with Family... that's a great way to celebrate the Holidays

We had a holiday party for our group... complete with a secret Santa... I scored a cool helicopter

As Christmas got closer, more and more lights started showing up

our neighborhood was making a pretty decent showing!

Even the little guy started getting into it, and would wear the hat every so often

We went to visit with family on Christmas Eve... fun times!

to give him some time to adjust, we read a book on a chair...

The little guy started to take pictures of everyone... so they started taking pictures back... he took a good pic!

We had a great time visiting with folks we don't get to visit with enough.

Santa made an early appearance... at first the little guy wasn't sure what was up... but he was SURE
he didn't want to sit on his lap!  =)  Mom gave Santa a booklet with scanned pictures of past visits when
they were younger... it was nice!

Santa gave the little guy his gift anyway

we did a gift exchange, which is always a fun time!

After the party, we went to the Christmas Eve services... The Shadow Lady sang in the choir, and I ran the slides...

For me, its a very real part of Christmas Eve... its a time to reflect on what the reason for the Season is...
Something that we don't do often enough, I'm afraid.

When we got home, we put the little guy to bed, and got everything ready for Santa...

Christmas Morning, the little guy was pretty thrilled about his train!

He took his time opening his gifts...

It was fun watching him discover what the things were... although he didn't want to move on to the next thing...

By the time he got done... it was nap time.

The season ended with Grandma, Grandpa, and the Aunties coming over for Christmas Dinner, and visiting...
which was a great way to end it, I thought.

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