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.

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.

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!