* Writing Letters to Santa *
The kids sat down to write their wish lists to send to Santa. Kara dictated a portion of her letter to Mark and then she wrote down the items that she asked for (Zhu Zhu Puppies and something Barbie related). Cole worked independently and consulted the Lego catalog to rank order his Star Wars and Ninjago requests.
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| Trying to decide which Lego ranks the highest. |
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| Working hard on her letter. |
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| Finished! Nothing but Lego's on his list. |
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| Kara was very proud of her letter she did herself! |
* Gingerbread Houses *
After several previous attempts at Gingerbread creations, we decided to focus on the fun of decorating instead of the trials and tribulations of constructing. Cole & Kara each had their own (pre-assembled) house to decorate in any way they wanted. Cole had a hay-day covering all surfaces with candy, while Kara focused on making the front entrance beautiful.
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| Cole has garland and lights on all sides, hedges, lamp posts, planters, and much, much more! |
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| Kara had a fancy window above her door, a doorbell, planters next to the door, a fence, and a walkway. |
* Decorating Christmas Cookies *
This year we tried something new for decorating cookies. In the past, we opened up some frosting, colored it, smeared some on the cookies, and relied heavily on sprinkles. This year, I made Royal Icing, tinted it several colors, and used squeeze bottles to do the decorating. The focus was more on colors, patterns, and designs, with a minimal amount of sprinkles (yea for that!). We had a ball decorating and everyone took so much more time because they could do more detail work.
We also made two batches of cookies - traditional sugar cookies in several designs and gingerbread kids. We read a book called The Gingerbread Pirate and Cole wanted to decorate cookies as pirates. Since I figured the gingerbread would be more for display than eating, we cheated and used a mix. Cole and I had lots of fun with these, and several of them lost limbs before baking (as in the book), anything that was a crack was a scar, etc. The Captain was the most creative, as we copied from the book to add a hat, cutlass (sword), and a peg leg. Cole focused mostly on turning the gingerbread kids into characters from books or tv shows, while Kara worked painstakingly on detailing the sugar cookies.
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| That nasty olive color was supposed to be black. I did the best I could, then realized after the fact that I could have bought black food coloring. Next year! We bought a few tubes of sparkly gel icing as well, and while it looked pretty and were fun to use, it didn't taste good. |
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| Kara did a lot of outlining and filling in the space with extra frosting and spreading it with toothpicks. |
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| The aftermath! Not too bad really, considering four people decorated for over an hour. |
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| Cole's: Pirate (left, with hat, cutlass, and peg leg), Zombie (center), and Ninja Kai (right, from Lego Ninjago) |
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| Kara's: her cutest was the angel in the center, especially her sweet little face! |
* Meijer Gardens *
We went to Meijer Gardens twice to look at the trains, holiday trees, and everything else they had to offer. Kara's sweet new baby doll, Katie Katharine, joined us on the second trip. : ) Please note the very
* Reindeer Food *
Making the traditional reindeer food. We used oats and glitter as usual, but added flour to give the reindeer extra speed!
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| They made a lot of food! That's what happens when you stop supervising to take pictures! |
* Christmas Eve *
After Church and a quick dinner, we started tracking Santa on the computer to see where he was delivering to. The kids were pretty excited to watch his progress, although they knew they would not be staying up long enough to see Santa get to North America.
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| We finally got out Cole's globe and started charting his course. We eventually determined that Santa was going in a North/South pattern and we were able to predict where he would land next. Fun! |
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| Getting cookies out for Santa. |
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| Kara counted out eight mini carrots for the reindeer (she was upset that we didn't have any big carrots, but was appeased by the fact that they could each have their own this way). |
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| Leaving the magic key on the doorstep so Santa could get into the house (since we have not chimney). |
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| Reading Twas the Night Before Christmas and stories from The Bible right before bed. |
We made a bucket list of fun things to do leading up to Christmas Day, and managed to do most of them, and have lots of fun! Great family memories!
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