'Tis the Season...for baking!

A baking frenzy started at our house during the snowy weekend and has continued all week long.

Decorating the gingerbread house:


Making cake pops to deliver to friends:




Sugar cookies:









Candy orange slice cookies, chocolate peppermint bark cookies, and peanut butter cookies (made with Hershey's Bliss instead of Kisses...learned that trick at a cookie exchange party last week)


This wasn't baking, but cutting out these magnetic nativity figures for the kids also kept me busy during the snow storm.

Nativity Costumes

Ben comes from a large family and they always draw names each Christmas for gift-giving. This year we needed a gift for his brother's family and I saw this fun idea at Design Mom to make a set of nativity costumes that they could use for acting out the nativity on Christmas Eve.

We had so much fun as a family putting these costumes together. We started at the thrift store and found clothes and fabric that would work and searched through all the crazy trinkets to find gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I bought more fabric at a fabric store and made a few costumes (my mom made the angel costume when she was here for Thanksgiving). We made a variety of sizes so hopefully they will last through the years.















All packaged up and ready to go:


Amelia had fun modeling the costumes:

White Christmas!

We received more snow yesterday than we usually get the entire winter. We have almost 20 inches in our yard and it is beautiful. It has been entertaining to watch the news, which I'm pretty sure was on all day yesterday, and hear about the storm with headlines like "Snow-pocalypse!" and get more statistics on the size of the storm than you could ever imagine. But it is definitely a big deal for this area. (I've heard varying statistics, but apparently this was the most snow ever for December, and maybe the biggest snow storm since the early 1920s...whatever the stats, we definitely broke some records.)

Amelia has been asking me when we would get snow, and I had to keep explaining that we just don't get much snow in Virginia. This was an early Christmas present for sure.

We had the best snow day ever yesterday. And it is continuing today. Plus, Ben has the next two weeks off of work so we're in no hurry to dig out of the mess.

We had a big breakfast of crepes, played in the snow with neighbors, drank hot chocolate, took a nice long afternoon nap, watched Christmas movies, played games, and just watched the snow fall. I forgot how quiet everything becomes when it snows.

We spent about 45 minutes getting ready to go outside and play. Elsa wasn't so sure about the snow, mostly because she had a hard time moving in it.








She's down.










Ben built an awesome sledding ramp.


(Amelia, her friend Mercedes, and Elsa)




Building a snowman...


...which turned into a snow pig. The snow was too fluffy for packing.

National Christmas Tree

We headed downtown the other night to see the National Tree. It had been so warm that day so we were hoping for a warm evening. Not quite. But we had fun anyway.




One of the smaller State trees with the White House in the background.




The yule log. Amelia refused to leave its warmth.

Traditions.

I love traditions. We have lots of fun things we do throughout December to celebrate Christmas. Some go way back and some we are creating now.

The paper chain. We did this every year when I was a kid. And even when we weren't kids anymore. At the beginning of December we created a huge paper chain with a link for each person for every day leading up to December 24. It was long. We would string it across the family room and watch it slowly disappear as it got closer to Christmas. Each night we would remove our link and see what our "assignment" was. Two people were in charge of the candles...we had candles we would burn down a notch each night. Someone got to do the advent calendar. Someone else chose a song to sing. Someone read a Christmas story. And one link had an activity for that day. I can still remember the feeling of sitting around as a family and reading Christmas stories by candlelight. We continued the tradition this year and Amelia has really enjoyed it.


The advent calendar. (Okay, one of several. I'm a little addicted.)


Christmas stories by candlelight.

This is our activity tree:

It has a numbered stocking for each day and in each stocking is an activity for the day. (Make cookies, decorate a gingerbread house, go see Christmas lights, make hot cocoa, watch a Christmas movie, etc.)



Amelia loved decorating the tree this year. Elsa loved throwing ornaments and watching them shatter.



(Elsa also loves to say "cheese" for photos.)

We have a fun nativity collection which is up to about 15 now with several from other countries. Amelia really enjoyed setting them up with me and loves to arrange and rearrange them. Elsa loves playing with the Little People Nativity.