Christmas is COMING!

My parents are heading to Utah this weekend and I am starting to get so excited for family time. Funny how I couldn't wait to move out of the house in high school and now I can't wait to go back and visit Oregon or see my parents. It is weird to think that I have been living in Utah for around 3-4 years (well off and on between school). It doesn't feel like I have been out of high school that long, but with a college graduation date set, it is crazy to think I am almost done with my education. Granted, we aren't talking until April of 2010 and with my profession I will have to always have to take continuing education courses.... In general though, after 2010 I will not be in a classroom setting, which is where I have been for the last 16 1/2 years of my life. To be quite frank, that makes me really sad. When I go visit Brett at BYU I get jealous of how great a school Brett is able to attend.
Every season the campus landscape at BYU is just so beautiful. This Christmas season the campus is lit with colorful lights that are so perfectly hung from the trees. The buildings on campus have Christmas trees that are decorated to a tee with different themes on display. I just miss the atmosphere of busy students passing by and finding a familiar face every now and then in the city that is BYU.
I am however grateful for my new school. Being with the same girls everyday from 8-5 can cause a lot of drama but it makes us grow closer then I could ever have thought. We all go through the same trials and can easily relate to each other. With my first semester now done, in retrospect it went by incredibly fast. I spent so much time and effort getting into this program and yet I have already completed one semester.
So as I look forward to Christmas and enjoying this break, I need to remind myself to just enjoy the here and the now. If I keep looking forward to the future, I am going to miss out on the present. As said in Kung Fu Panda "Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."
With a baby blessing and wedding in the works this break it will be quite busy. A good busy. I look forward to spending all my time with family and friends and honestly I cannot imagine any other use I would want to make of my time off. I take that back. Seeing some of my close friends in Oregon would be nice, but hopefully we can visit sometime in the near future.

So if you have stuck it through my ramblings, I thought I would post pictures of some of our Christmas decor.

We don't have a chimney so Santa will have to come through our china hutch instead.

I told my nephew this tree was his size. How wrong I was. My nephew is in fact taller than our tree and he pointed out that our tree is full of "tiny balls". I like to call them ornaments and they do not look that "tiny" to me but then again I am biased because it is our tree....We also lack a star on top of our tree, but that is because we never found a small enough star to top our tree.

I just really like this sign we have hanging in the kitchen.

Christmas is only a week away!