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.

Christmas Lights All Over The Place 2015

Happy New Year, good readers! I still can't believe that 2015 is already a swiftly receding view in my rear-view mirror. Boy, that was fast. And wouldn't you know it...January 2016 is also going to be in our rear-view mirror unless I get caught up on my blogging soon. So here goes!

 

(By the way: my next few posts are grouped by theme over chronology, so some of our Christmas happenings may appear slightly out of order. But the Christmas season is a big busy blur anyway, so it kind of makes sense that these blog posts reflect that scattered feeling.)

I realize most of you are so over Christmas by now, but too bad! You're about to be inundated with photos of Christmas lights...lots of Christmas lights. Looking back through my photo archives, it seems our family saw quite a lot of them this year. Here they are (in more or less chronological order):

Despite having the warm glow of our lovely Christmas tree in the front room, our family craved more holiday spectacle. And what better place to experience spectacle than at Winterhaven, the Tucson neighborhood that holds its annual light show every December? The Monday after the kids got out of school, we headed over to see what the residents had come up with this year.

There were a few "nerd Christmas" houses this year that amused us greatly, like this Game Of Thrones-inspired home:

 

 

This home used to be Harry Potter themed, but apparently the residents found a new franchise to geek out about!

Another house had this goofy Star Wars nativity.

 

I laughed.

We also enjoyed this Nightmare Before Christmas house as well:

 

And the girls always enjoy the Disney Princess house. This year, there were even actors there to greet the visitors!

 

There were other, more traditionally Christmas-y houses too, of course:

"All you need is glove." Cute!

 

 

Our family loves the movie A Christmas Story, and there is a house in Winterhaven that goes all out with Christmas Story decor. Every year, they have added something new! The first year we saw this house, it was the famous "leg-lamp" in the window; after a year or two, cardboard cutouts of most of the characters in the film dotted the lawn.

They triple dog-dared her.

This year, the residents added the piece de resistance: you got to "meet Santa" on an elevated platform, then slide down to the ground when you were done telling him what you wanted for Christmas!

 

The girls had a great time going up there and then sliding down afterwards.

As usual, we had a great time checking everything out. Each year, our girls get a little older and a little more capable of walking the neighborhood without succumbing to exhaustion and/or despair. There was some whining along the way, but for the most part everyone behaved themselves and had a great time.

In the week leading up to Christmas, we went out to see the lights again...this time, we stayed closer to home and visited a few neighborhoods in Green Valley and Sahuarita. There is one neighborhood in Green Valley that is known for its copious amounts of Christmas lights. The amount of decorations we saw was especially impressive, considering this neighborhood is part of a retirement community, where the majority of the houses and their yards are quite small. And as we drove by the nearby country club, who did we happen to see?

SANTA CLAUS!! Boy, were the girls excited (especially seeing as how I forgot to take the kids to see "mall Santa" this year). But as if seeing Santa weren't good enough, he then offered them all presents. Yes, this Santa had a truckful of toys he was handing out to all the kids passing by (some of them were previously owned, it seems...it was nice to know that "Santa" had lots of helpers).

Lovingly clutching their new toys, the girls and I stopped off at one more (amazing) house before heading home that night...

...the "Christmas House," as it is known in our family, is really something to see. It's almost National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation levels of decorated. I've been told it takes months for this family to set up all the lights, and I can believe it. To make the home an even more appealing visit, the homeowners set up a collection box for canned food items outside their home, to be donated to our local food bank.

 

 

The "Christmas House" is located very close to the girls' charter school, and so we've been to see it a few times. This last visit (our last before Christmas, and our last visit of the year, as it turned out) felt very special. It's magical to stand in the midst of that glow, and dream of Santa coming to visit. It was a great way to end our "Christmas-light watching" for the season...

...except that we went to see lights one more time after Christmas, this time in Mesa, a couple of hours north. Every year after Christmas, our family takes a day trip to the Phoenix area. We play, have fun together, eat out a couple of times, and always (to cap off the day) head to the Mesa Arizona LDS temple to check out all the lights!

Even though Christmas is technically over when we go look at these lights, the atmosphere on the temple grounds always helps me feel an extra jolt of Christmas spirit. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir music is piped through the grounds; Nativity scriptures are narrated by church leaders; beautiful statues of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus are set up facing the Visitor's Center, which has a yearly display of stunning Nativity sets from around the world; the girls excitedly flock to the large Christus statue...it's a wonderful night, every year.

 

The Visitor's Center had been updated a bit since our last visit. On the night we visited, there was a lovely new multimedia exhibit highlighting missionaries and their work.

 

My favorite part was looking along the wall at the hundreds of former missionary name-tags; it was fun to guess where all those missionaries served. I enjoyed spotting all the Russian and Ukrainian-language name-tags in particular; there were more on display than I'd thought there would be!

Visiting the temple lights is a great way to cap off the holiday season (even if it may seem late to some!). It's a good reminder to us that even though the Christmas season brings a lot of excitement, the Savior is whom we should be remembering and honoring during this holiday.

 

I know my Christmas posts may seem repetitive at times, dear readers, and I do apologize if my love of Christmas gets a bit "samey," year after year. But I'm afraid my great love for Christmas can't be restrained! Every year, I get caught up in the joy and the magic.

I'm so thankful for my knowledge of Jesus Christ, and I'm so thankful for my wonderful family. Both of those possessions mean that my Christmases in recent years have been wonderful. It's a busy time of year, but it's also so beautiful!