Christmas Activity Advent Week #1

Our first week of advent activities was a (qualified) success.

We decorated the tree...with only one major bout of yelling!  Yay us!  I am really glad we shipped our Christmas decorations over in our container.  Just pulling them out of the bins made me happy, and the boys loved rediscovering their favorites.  The faux tree the husband got for us last year looks positively festive this time around, festooned with all our familiar ornaments.  My tabletop tree collection is decorating a coffee table in a corner instead of the top shelf of a book case or a mantle, but they look like a little red, green, and sparkly forest, which I kind of like.  And, for ONCE, our ridiculous red curtains actually look like they belong!  Hooray!

We made Christmas cookies, gingerbread and sugar cut outs.  The gingerbread was SUPERB, if I do say so myself--I finally found an easy and tasty recipe after my time-consuming attempt at Martha Stewart's gigantic and complicated recipe a few years ago.  The sugar cookie recipe was a short-cut involving a cake mix, but it really didn't turn out too well--all the little men we cut out looked like they were obese when we got them out of the oven!  However, the boys made some perfectly awful looking iced monstrosities out of the gingerbread cookies, and they had fun doing it, which was the whole point!  They also got ended up with a bit of a sugar high, but oh well, it's the holidays!

Deep in the midst of decorating, well on the way to a super sugar high!

You can just see our tree in the background as
J moves on to the eating part of the program

On another day, we put up our two main nativity sets.  When I was growing up, we always put my Dad's nativity set on top of the piano, an old set with painted figures and animals made out of paper mache and ceramics.  The original set we had, which I think was probably a combination of two or three different sets, included lots of animals, donkeys, cows, camels, dogs, sheep, etc., and we all loved rearranging the animals, much to my father's chagrin.  At some point, and I don't even remember when this started, we began adding animals to the menagerie when we found some that were the same size.  One year a sea turtle, the next year a pot-bellied pig, the year after that a platypus.  Don't you think all the animals would have wanted to see the birth of the Savior?  Of course, we may have moved from the sublime to the ridiculous over the years; last year I gave my dad a Qatari man in a thobe to add to the watchers, and the set now contains a cerberus and a unicorn, I think!

One year, I tried to find similar sets for all my siblings and me, at least starter sets with the basic figures and animals, which resulted in quite a long search and buying spree on Ebay.  Since then, we have added additional animals to ours, of course, so now we have a gorilla, a tiger, a meerkat, a panda and baby, and a chicken, among others.  The boys know that they are allowed to play with the more exotic (and indestructible) animals in front if they leave the more fragile animals and figures in the back alone.  So far, this system has worked pretty well, but, just in case, my mother-in-law helpfully gave us the complete Fisher Price Little People nativity set when J was little, so we also put that one out and let the kids have free reign with it, which makes everyone happy!

The Little People palms trees also make great crowns!

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Speaking of gingerbread, we were supposed to go to the Marriott for a gingerbread house making session,  (I could only handle one day of decorating mess in my own house, so I tried to outsource the houses!), but instead I ended up in the ER that day.  Ooops!  We did have a good morning before all that went down, at least, but I'm trying to reschedule gingerbread houses for later in the month, or I will be forced to use our Ikea gingerbread house kits and whatever decorations we have on hand, which are not many.  We'll see how that all turns out in the end!

Before we went on with the rest of our ill-fated day,
we had breakfast at Jones the Grocer.

E ate the entire plate of the traditional English breakfast,
which includes two eggs, sautéed mushrooms and spinach,
baked beans, chicken sausage, sourdough toast, and a
slow cooked tomato.  He loved it all, especially the beans and mushrooms!

And finally, our first week of activities also included a movie night in which we courageously
 braved Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and got through the whole movie for the first time ever!  The abominable snowman did not dominate us for once--progress!

"No, Mommy, we aren't scared at all."

Post movie night selfie!