Crafting And Cooking For Christmas

We are always so tired by mid-December; it is such a busy month! Thus, we found it especially amazing when our friend Scott Nielsen somehow found the time and energy to complete work on his homemade snow machine. That creates actual snow. And he was able to premiere its abilities during the last week of school. Kind of makes us look like lazy complainers, doesn't it?

 

The snow machine doesn't work too well unless the outside temperature is below a certain limit. As luck would have it, we experienced an unusually cold December in 2015, so Scott had several opportunities to test out his creation. And lucky for us, he invited us over to test out the product!

 

We weren't able to stay long, because we stopped by the Nielsen's house on our way to school. But those few minutes were certainly awesome! The girls were in awe of the snow coating the Nielsen's front yard and driveway. It was like a pint-sized Winter Wonderland, transported specially to southern Arizona by Jack Frost himself.

 

As you can see, our girls (and our neighbors the Gillespies, who are part of our carpool) really enjoyed themselves!

Just a few days after this, school thankfully ended for the year, and it was time to unwind It is a relief to kick back, relax, watch a little too much TV, and work on whatever projects we feel like doing at the moment. Here are a few of the things we accomplished while waiting for Christmas to come:

 

We finally made our Christmas ornaments! We'd had the supplies for several weeks by now, but had still never made the time to put them together. This year, the girls wanted their homemade ornaments to be of the "clear globe filled with decorations" style. Which was a nice idea, but we didn't choose our decorations carefully enough.

 The candy canes had to be twisted & contorted to fit inside. And we bought lots of wintry sparkly spheres to insert, only to find out that lots of them didn't fit into the globes! Oof. But we managed to put enough stuff inside to make them look moderately pretty, at least. Back to the drawing board next year!

The girls also made some tie-dyed T-shirts. Lorelai got a tie-dye kit for her birthday, and hadn't yet had the opportunity to use it. There was plenty of dye, so I bought a white shirt for each of the girls and they went to town!

 

 

Here they are in their new shirts.

Some of the blue dye bled a little in the wash, giving all the shirts a slightly bluish tint. In addition, a couple of the girls still felt there wasn't enough color on their shirts and were a bit frustrated. However, I thought they all looked pretty nice!

We also found time to put together our gingerbread house. Maybe one of these years I will try baking the house from scratch. But it wasn't this year; I bought a kit from CostCo...it was even pre-assembled! All the girls had to do was decorate it, which they did with relish.

They also enjoyed taking big bites out of the house in the days afterwards.

For two years now, we have baked cookies and taken them to local fire stations at Christmas. Last year, we took the cookies to the station on Christmas Eve. This year we ran a little short on time, so we made the cookies on Christmas Eve and delivered them on Christmas Day. The girls had had so much fun making the "ninja-bread" men earlier in the month that I decided to make gingerbread cookies again.

This time, I made the gingerbread from scratch, but bought some decorative icing and sprinkles from the store, to make them a little easier to decorate. I also pulled out my large-ish collection of Christmas cookie cutters and let the kids choose a variety of shapes.

Those cookies are lookin' great!

The girls had a ton of fun decorating these cookies, and they did a really nice job, all things considered. Aurora really loved using sprinkles; in fact, she managed to empty a whole bottle of sprinkles in the process of beautifying her cookies. The paper plate was literally sagging under the weight of the sprinkles! I think somebody will have to watch her next time.

After decorating the cookies, we watched A Christmas Story with Grandma Barrett (who spent Christmas Eve at our home). Then it was time to open the kids' presents from Grandma; new night shirts that she'd made herself! They were very comfortable and the girls loved them.

 

 

Then, since it was Christmas Eve, it was time for the little ones to be snug in their beds. Nathan and I finished bringing down all the presents, and we prepared some food for breakfast the next morning. After that, it was time to relax and let the Christmas magic take over.

 

 

 

Christmas morning was an excited blur of joy, as it always is.

 

Lorelai is reading the "Lord of the Rings" series, so we finally got her her own copies of those books!

Yay! Now I can laminate whatever I want.

 

 

 

It's impossible to capture all the smiles on film, but it is wonderful to share my daughters' joy in the season. Since our kids are slowly growing out of the "toy" phase of their lives, there were fewer toys than ever before under our tree...with two exceptions:

 

 

The girls got tablets this year! Those are just more expensive "toys," right? Celeste and Aurora got one to share, and Lorelai got one of her own.

The joy on my oldest daughter's face was even more gleeful than I'd expected. The old-fashioned part of me is a little worried about "losing" my kids to their electronic devices, so I'm hoping they won't spend too much time on the tablets, or start neglecting more important things in order to goof off. I think the next couple of months will reveal how "addicted" the girls are, and if I'll need to create other things for them to do. For now, though, we are letting them have fun with their new tablets (within reason!), and trying to keep their lives balanced with other worthwhile things.

Once we got all our stuff unwrapped, we spent a blissful afternoon getting to know all our new presents, and preparing our yummy ham dinner.

 

As we had the previous year, we invited our friends the Valles to join us for our Christmas dinner. It was great to have them over and to have a nice dinner with friends.

 

We even got to top ourselves off with yummy Danish Dessert, courtesy of Grandma Barrett! It is one of her traditional holiday desserts, and we were very excited to get some of it this Christmas.

After the eating and entertaining (and after delivering the girls' beautiful cookies, of course), it was time to lounge around as a family...

Do you think she's happy with her gift? I can't really tell.

...and as you know, there's no better way for families to bond than to stare into electronic screens together! I kid, I kid...we also played a bunch of new board games & card games (the girls are particularly taken with Sushi Go, Exploding Kittens, and Mice and Mystics). It was a Merry Christmas, indeed. And Nathan had a whole week off of work ahead! We had a lot of exciting things planned.