Christmas Activities

We had a lot of Christmas fun before we left for Washington.  Here are some pictures.

Grandma and Grandpa came over one night and we all decorated gingerbread houses.  We also gave Grandpa a brand-new toy record player to replace the one we broke while staying with them.  He looks so happy.

Anna and Matthew joined some of the kids from church and sang Christmas carols at a local convalescent home.

Steve and I visited San Francisco city hall for Google's Christmas party.  It was a long drive there and back, but we had fun swing dancing and eating fancy macaroni & cheese.  We also tried our very first oysters.

O, Christmas Tree! O, Christmas Tree!

Well, we got our tree.  Because we are going to my mom & dad's for Christmas, we decided to go with a little tree from Home Depot.  There was a big pile of $20 3-ft trees.  Anna looked at one and then looked at another and she loved them both.  When we told her she had to pick one, she broke down crying.  "I just can't decide!  I love them both.  If we choose one, we'll have to leave this one here by itself!"  We consoled her by telling her that some other family would of course pick this tree to take home and love.  She then asked if she could take a picture with it so that she could remember it always.

We got the tree home and decorated it with all of our homemade decorations.  It's actually very cute.  I think we'll have to have a little kid tree from now on.

Christmas 2013

This year we tried something different.  We decided to make Christmas Eve our secular holiday and try to keep Christmas Day more focused on Christ.  It went ok.  I thing we need some refining of details and more of a plan of what to do on Christmas Day.

So, that being said, Santa came on Christmas Eve to our house.  Luckily, our kids are small enough that they sleep in to their regular times.  Yay!  I know, we won't have that for much longer.

I ran down to get the cinnamon rolls out of the fridge and into the oven.  Unfortunately, they were still rock solid from being frozen the day before.  I crossed my fingers and put them in a warm oven, praying they would defrost and rise while we opened presents.

Stockings were first, of course.  Matthew got toothbrushes and toothpaste as well as some stacking cups.  Anna got some lacing cards and a princess calendar that is hanging on her wall.

The first then Anna saw when she came into the living room was the trampoline.  She was so excited and started jumping on it right away.  Score 1 for Daddy!  It was her favorite gift that day.  Anna got some clothes, a crocheted hat, a new piggy bank, some Sunday movies, and children's scriptures, along with the trampoline.

Matthew also got a crocheted hat along with a new blanket, a toy car and boat, and a little baby.  Daddy got him a big Tigger.  It's almost as tall as he is.

Steve got us all a surprise gift.  It turned out to be a bike trailer.  It's supposed to be for me to take the kids around, but I'm too short for Steve's bike, so he takes them out when he exercises.

We spent the rest of the day playing with our gifts and hanging out in the backyard in our PJs in the 70+ weather.

That evening we had our fondue dinner.  I tried something new, a Christmas tree salad with kale, lettuce and lots of fruit and nuts.  It was delicious and even Steve liked it!  We also had homemade rolls and yummy meats.  I even found bockwurst!  This year I made plans to use up all the meat and nothing went bad.

On Christmas day, we had a short devotional about the shepherds and how we can be like the shepherds, too.  We then Skyped with as many of our extended family as we could.  It was nice to spend part of the day with family even if we couldn't be there with them.

The Christmas Season

Anna working on her gingerbread house

Steve's decorating efforts on his side of the house.

Please excuse the wonky picture placement.  Blogger wasn't working for me.
We had a great Christmas season this year even though it felt a little more rushed than usual.  In years past, Steve and I have had a goal to have all Christmas gifts bought and Christmas letter written and sent out by the last day of November.  With the move to Morgan Hill in early November, it just didn't happen that way.  We didn't even mail out a letter; we just emailed it!

We started off the season with St. Nicholas day on December 6.  Anna and Matthew left their shoes outside their bedroom doors.  In the morning, they each found a candy cane, a winter book, and a little St. Nick.  Anna's St. Nick is a little wooden peg person, while Matthew's is a stuffed round gnome.

My decorated half of the house

This year's ornament, pinecone gnomes

Both kids with Santa, Matthew didn't last long.

On December 13, we had St. Lucia day.  This year, that just consisted of eating baked Lussekatter and reading a little picture book about a family celebrating it.  After reading the book, Anna says she wants me to make her a Lucy dress and candle head wreath.  I told her that would be fine as long as she remembers that means she has to make breakfast for everyone!

Anna with Santa at the ward party.

Making Christmas sweets with Anna

We finally got down to some serious Christmas preparations.  First up was decorating houses- our house and gingerbread houses.  We bought 2 house kits, one for Steve & I and one for Anna.  She had so much fun decorating that house!  She concentrated hard and had her little tongue stuck out.

Anna with her house.  She was so proud.

I got most of the decor set out on a Sunday afternoon while the kids were napping.  It will Venice when they can help, but now they are more likely to break something.  I love having a mantle and being able tout stuff up on the acoustic piano that was here was nice, too.  I think the downstairs looked very festive.

My three merry snowmen.

Sawing away with the stupid, ineffective saw.

We waited a little before getting our Christmas tree this year.  The last couple of years our trees got so dry that we were afraid we were going to start a fire.  This year, we went to a real tree farm and cut our own.  They don't have local evergreens like fir or spruce.  Instead there was a pine with really long needles or cypress trees.  We chose the cypress.  It was...interesting.  The needles are more like a cedar, flat, and the branches were very bendy.

We got 2 trees, a little one for the kids and a big one for the family.

Cutting the tree was the biggest pain.  The farm provided this saw on the end of a long stick.  It was like trying to cut through the trunk with dental floss.  Steve and I both worked at it for a good twenty minutes with no real progress.  Luckily, we brought a saw with us from home.  We got that out and were through the trunk in 3 minutes!

Decorating the big Christmas tree the first time.

Anna loved decorating the tree.  I love getting out the ornaments and looking at all the things we've made.  The tree was beautiful!  Anna went down for a nap and I started working on dinner.  Suddenly, I heard kind of a rushing sound.  I turned around just in time to see the entire tree topple over.  Oh dear.  Steve grabbed the tree and I mopped up the water all over the floor.  After getting everything all squared away, we sat back and admired our work.

Christmas Morning

 Christmas morning was very nice.  Luckily, Anna is still young enough that she slept until after 7am.  That makes for a nice, relaxed morning.  Having Allison over was really nice, too.

Anna got some play food and pots for her play kitchen.  She also got some clothes and a doll bed.  Her two favorite things were a Pooh blanket for her bed and her own copy of Cinderella.  She snuggled up with the blanket to watch the movie as soon as possible.

Steve got a wall map of the world, the movie The Glenn Miller Story, and an external hard drive.   I got some books and a food processor.  We had such a great day and it was a good Christmas.

Christmas Eve

We had such a great Christmas Eve!

Alli came to visit for the weekend and we loved having her.  Unfortunately, she did catch the nasty stomach bug that has been going around the neighborhood and was sick most of the day.  Luckily, it's a 24 hour bug and she was better the next day.

We had a snowstorm on Friday so there was a great layer of snow.  Steve took Anna to the nearby ravine to do some sledding while I did some dinner prep.  They were gone for more than an hour having a blast.   Anna loved the sledding.  She met up with some of our friends from our old neighborhood: Skylar and Rylee.  She wanted to sled with only them.  Skylar wouldn't, but Rylee did.

Later, we made our ornaments.  I wanted to have an ornament that Anna could do and that used materials that I already had laying around.  Luckily, I noticed a few people had made cute holiday people from craft sticks.  I have a bunch of those, plus felt and paint, so away we went.

I used the craft sticks to make a snowflake and a Christmas tree.  Anna painted both of them with the paints.  After she finished those, she went off to bed for her nap and the rest of us worked on our ornaments.  We made ours a little different.  Steve made a snowman, I made a snowman and a Rudolf, and Alli got into it the most.  She made a snowman, elf, Santa, and Rudolf.  It was a lot of fun.

That night we had our fondue dinner.  I thought that I was conservative in cutting up the meat, but apparently I over-estimated and we had a lot left over.  It was delicious.  Anna had fun stuffing herself with ham and chicken dipped in honey and trying shrimp for the first time.  Luckily, Alli was feeling well enough to join in for dinner.

After Anna was in bed, we ended the night by watching A Muppet Christmas Carol.  The perfect ending to a great day.

Making Fudge

Of course, we had to make some treats for Christmas and Anna and I tackled some fudge.  I decided this year to make the fudge a combination of semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips.  I like the sweetness that the milk chocolate gives it, while the semi-sweet makes a firmer fudge.  It worked really well and I love the walnuts in them.  Anna's contribution consisted mainly of stirring the chocolate and licking the spatula.

December Crafts

Here's what you're looking at: Top l-r: Anna's pomander, finished beeswax snowflakes, cutting her snowflake, Steve & Anna decorating the house; Middle l-r: Steve working on his pomander, beeswax ornaments hardening in the pan, proud Anna with her snowflake; Bottom l-r: our finished pomanders, snowflakes I made on the library doors, Anna & I decorating, the finished gingerbread house!

Here's a little bit of what we've done this Christmas season.  We've tried to keep things low-key and fairly simple.

We started off December by making some orange pomanders.  I got some whole cloves and clementines at the store.  I got some recommendations to use clementines instead of oranges because the skin is thinner and easier for kids to pierce with the cloves.  Anna really enjoyed making them.  I did end up just piercing random holes all over her orange with a knife and that made it really easy for her to do it.  I made a couple and we even convinced Steve to join in.  His is the Christmas tree orange.  It was fun and fast and now our library smells great.

Later, Anna and I decided to make some snowflakes.  I folded hers into a square snowflake just so she wouldn't have to cut through so many layers of paper.  She's still learning how to use the scissors.  In fact, she mostly made random straight cuts along the sides.  I went back and just connected some of the cuts to make them holes.  She was so proud of herself and her snowflake.

One of the crafts I did mostly on my own.  I bought a pound of beeswax from Amazon and a cute snowflake cookie pan from JoAnn's.  I melted the beeswax in a double boiler and then Anna would point to the snowflake she wanted me to fill.  We ended up making 17 snowflakes total.  Later, I used a hot piece of metal to poke a hole in each one and threaded it with a piece of twine to make ornaments.  We passed them out to our neighbors and friends for their Christmas gifts.

Our biggest project so far has been the gingerbread house.  Steve picked up a kit at the grocery store.  We used the candy they provided plus some that we got at the bulk section of Winco to decorate.  Mostly, I put frosting on the house and Anna chose which candies she wanted and stuck them into the frosting.  I did candy corns around the bottom and the front door.  Steve did the jellybean windows.  We had a lot of fun making it and Anna is enthralled by it even two weeks later.  She drags her stool over to the counter to stare at it.  Well, stare at it and slowly eat a piece here and a piece there of the candy!

Just one more project left- ornaments.  We're going to do those when Alli gets here for Christmas weekend.  That'll be another post.  Merry Christmas!

O, Christmas Tree...

 Well, we got our Christmas tree.  We waited a week later than last year because our tree last year was one crispy critter on Christmas Day.  We also bought our tree from a local vendor instead of from Home Depot.  We're hoping that we'll do a little better moisture-wise this year.

Here's our tree, half lit.

Vario's is in downtown Tooele.  They had a lot of trees for us to choose from and we decided to get an 8 footer.  It wasn't really hard to find one, but Steve was worried about getting it home.  Luckily, they guy there was willing to tie it on for us.  It only slipped back a little bit.

After a few false starts, we were able to get it into the stand and fairly straight.  That was a challenge because we found it has a crooked trunk!  The next step, of course, was the lights.  We had two strings that started out half working, but then we got them both working.  Steve strung them on the tree and plugged them in.  Only half worked!  At that point, Steve decided to go buy some new lights and recycle the old strands.

That evening, we all got together and decorated the tree.  It looks great!

Christmas Fun

What a great Christmas it has been for us this year!  I have loved being home for the holidays, though I do miss all our family out there.  There's something to be said about not rushing through airports or worrying if the presents will fit!

This year, we were all about relaxing.  We made sure that all the presents were bought and the Christmas cards mailed by the end of November.  We also set up the tree and decorations the day after Thanksgiving.  We were set!

Steve's the 'wise guy' in the middle

Over the next few weeks, we watched a lot of Christmas movies (It's a Wonderful Life, Home Alone, Frosty, Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, Charlie Brown Christmas, The Christmas Story).  Thanks Netflix!  We watched the First Presidency Devotional and listened to the Tooele County Choir's Christmas concert.  At our ward party, Steve played one of the wise men with the bishop and first councellor.  We didn't stay for Santa, it was too crazy.  Later, Steve and I went to see the Nutcracker Ballet put on by the Utah Regional Ballet in Orem.  They did a great job!  This was our first year of doing Advent.  It was nice to have the candles going, but we kept forgetting to light them until the evening!  I hope next year to tweak some things and do better.

On Christmas Eve, we had a surprise!  Santa must have heard that Anna didn't get to visit at the ward party, so he came by the house.  Anna was a little unsure of him, so she sat on my lap while she talked with him.  We gave him some goodies to take back to the North Pole and he gave Anna a candy cane.  She liked that the best!  During the day, we watched Christmas on Sesame Street, a present from Daddy to Anna.  She enjoys Sesame Street so much.  This was our first fondue on our own and we did pretty well.  The food was yummy, even though Anna only ate a little.  Steve and I stuffed ourselves on meat, veggies and dip, crackers and cheese, and sparkling cider.  After getting Anna to bed, it was time to get the presents out and assemble Anna's table and chairs.  Good job, Daddy!

We had church the next day at 9am.  We decided to open presents after church.  It was quite the trick to keep Anna out of the living room!  When we got back, we all changed back into our pajamas and opened presents.  Anna enjoyed getting things out of her stocking (utensils, socks, hair bows, play dishes, and candy) and ripping the wrapping paper off of her gifts.  Once the MegaBlocks were spotted, though, we had a hard time getting her to focus on opening the rest of her gifts!  Her favorites seem to be the MegaBlocks as well as her table and chairs set.  Steve got some Super Soakers, CDs, a computer game, and books.  I got CDs, computer games, Yahtzee, and several gift cards.  It was a nice morning.

After opening presents, Steve went to bed.  He had been battling a cold all week and felt terrible that day.  He ended up sleeping for 9 hours during Christmas day as well as all that night!  We took him to the Urgent Care on Monday and discovered he had strep.  No wonder he felt terrible!

Steve took the following week off.  We spent our time shopping, watching movies, and sleeping in.  It was great!

We had such a great Christmas season and are looking forward to many more!