It's that time of year, Christmas time is here! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas. This year was a treat on Christmas Eve. My job closed early and I only had to work three hours before they let us go home, which was a great surprise. I was out by 11:00 am and able to go home and start getting everything ready for Christmas and doing crafts and fun things with the kids.
I hung up the ornament wreath that I had made a few years ago. This was a fun craft I found on Youtube and was able to make this wreath for less than $9.00 and it doesn't look too bad if I say so myself.
We originally planned to head down to Florida for Christmas this year but plans changed and so we stayed home in Missouri. The weather was surprisingly beautiful. The few days leading up to Christmas, we were having heavy snow, the weather was around 10 degrees... it was cold and bitter. But on Christmas, it turned around and hit 70 degrees out of nowhere! How crazy is that? I have never had a warm Christmas in Missouri like that before. It's usually snowing or very cold.
The kids wanted to build a gingerbread house and so we did. I bought the Super Mario Castle kit and we had fun and enjoyed putting this together. As you can see, the kids loved decoring it. I let them do that part all by themselves.
We put up the tree and I let them go at it and decorate that too. Usually, the tree is saved for only me to decorate with my fancy ornaments. But this year, I was so busy with everything else, I let them do it for me with all of our "fun" ornaments. I think they did an incredible job for only being thirteen, five, and seven years old. It looks perfect! This tree was a lot bigger this year so they had a lot more to try and cover, but they did not complain. They had a blast!
This year I also allowed them to go to the store and choose an ornament for each of them. This is something that I have wanted to do every year but never seemed to for some reason. I thought it would be a fabulous tradition. So We started now. Each child got to choose an ornament they liked to hang as their own. Natalya chose a crown because she is the Queen. Reggie chose a hot dog because that is his favorite food. And Larissa chose a baby because she loves her baby dolls.
We also did a fun craft where the kids made and decorated salt dough ornaments.
A few years ago, we made cornstarch dough ornaments and those turned out very cute. Here is the recipe for the cornstarch ornaments. Otherwise, the recipe we used for the salt dough ornaments are below:
My kids did not finish theirs as we were trying to get ready to leave and see the Magic Tree, which unfortunately did not happen. I think that would have been too crowded with the warmer weather. But it's ok. We will go next year. We went a couple of years ago and I have been wanting to go back since it only a few minutes from our house.
We placed cookies and egg nog on this fun wooden Christmas cutting board/tray that my mom gave to me for the kids to use. Of course, I had to run out at 9:00 pm on Christmas Eve to the only place open...Target, just to get some cookies and egg nog. And so I did.
Once everything was settled, the little ones and I tracked Santa on the NORAD tracker and they had a blast doing that. They got so excited! They immediately wanted to go to bed so that Santa didn't miss our house.
The tree was all lit and the kids finally fell asleep. Santa arrived a little later than expected because the kids kept waking up to try and catch Santa.
In the morning, the kids woke up and were so excited to open their presents. They got what they were hoping to get. So everyone had a happy Christmas. Later on that day, we went over to my parent's house and opened gifts there too and had a nice time visiting.
No comments