One Hundred and Eighty Elf Hats

I want to keep Christmas simple and family-focused, with a huge dose of quality time replacing a huge dose of unnecessary consumerism. After reading *this and checking out the link she had for an easy advent calendar to do with kids, I thought how I would love to do that and make this Christmas season more meaningful for my children, BUT (isn't there always a "but"?) I don't have time/energy/patience/ability/"insert any other lame excuse here" to make a cutesy little calendar right now and isn't-it-too-bad-I-didn't-think-of-this-sooner because I'm an all or nothing type and can't start on Day 3 or something. SOOO... I modified the idea and wrote down a bunch of ideas of Christmas Season activities and we're putting them in a bowl and drawing one (or more) out each day. (I prefer to think of myself as "flexible" rather than "disorganized" thank you very much.) A plus of this way of picking Christmas activities is not having to assign days because some things you just can't know ahead of time, like if there will be enough snow for "Go sledding down the big hill at the high school" or if I will have the energy that day for "Make a gingerbread train and and train station and decorate them with way too much candy" (Kirby's idea of course) so this way we can put it back and pick a different one if it doesn't work for that day. Today we watched Dr. Suess's "How the Grinch Stole Christmas."

It's one of Kirby and Sam's favorites so we watch it year round but it was with an especially Christmas feeling that we watched it today. The boys also "decorated" a tree with jingle bells and candy canes. Kirby explained with all his 4-year-old, older-brother wisdom to Sam that these candy canes were not for eating. Then he later modified his decision to "we can eat the ones that break" and suddenly a surprising number were falling off the tree and getting accidentally stepped on. Oops.


Kirby decided to make a Christmas cake. I came in a little late on that one. I explained he needed to measure and follow a recipe if he wanted it to be actual Cake. He said the recipe was a secret and he DID measure: "3 cups of sugar, 3 cups of flour, 3 cups of milk, a LITTLE salt, and a LITTLE duh-nilla (vanilla)." (Well, so much for the secret!) He used my hand mixer and everything, which I just barely rescued from getting dumped in a very soapy sink where Kirby was responsibly washing the dishes from his cake making escapade. Greg let him bake the batter and it was quite the concoction as you can imagine.


He served it up for him and Sam with sprinkles on top.



Oh, and I made 180 elf hats out of napkins for a church Christmas party tomorrow night and of course the boys wanted some to wear after watching me make them all day so we made one for each of them out of tissue paper.

The first few napkin hats - they got better as I went along but my pictures didn't


Sam trying on his own tissue paper elf hat (Kirby wouldn't hold still for a picture in his)


Jiorji was very cooperative and picked this day to be good at taking naps. Love that girl!!!


Anyway, this was a long post because I have really been needing the unique therapy of writing. If you have any ideas for fun Christmas activities, please leave a comment! I am very open to ideas and won't even have to rearrange or reschedule. That's FLEXIBILITY, my friends!

*I love this blog! I've been reading it for just over a year. I stumbled across it when I was looking up info on if you can ride in a hot air balloon when you're pregnant. I've found a lot of similarities with Emily and love her writing style. By the way, if you ever get a chance to go in a hot air balloon, you totally should! (Unless maybe you are pregnant, as I found out, but it didn't really matter because I wasn't. Pregnant that is.) We took my Dad for his birthday and it was AWESOME!!!