Merry-Making and Christmas Crafts!

 

Happy Holidays from our home to yours! As per every December, I'm feeling like Buddy the Elf with my long, yet awesome holiday to-do list. ("First we'll make snow angels for two hours, then we'll go ice skating, then we'll eat a whole roll of Tollhouse Cookie-dough as fast as we can, and then we'll snuggle.")

 

 

 

We have been on the festive fast track since the day after Thanksgiving. (I mean, we put up our Christmas tree at 7 a.m. on Black Friday. We opted for a small artificial tree this year. I felt slightly sad to not get a real one, but I bought a spruce-scented candle and got over it. With an eight-month-old, it's nice to not worry about her consuming needles and sap.)

 

 

 

 

Cece did the majority of the tree decorating. I only strung the lights and arranged the more fragile ornaments towards the top of the tree. She's like a little enthusiastic elf full of Christmas cheer and I love it.

 

 

We created homemade cinnamon ornaments last year and had such fun doing so that I wanted to find another easy DIY ornament for this year. We made peppermint ornaments and they are a lovely addition to the rest of the homemade decorations we have on the tree.

(If you want to try, here are the directions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease metal cookie cutters. Arrange mints within cookie cutters on parchment paper. Bake 5 to 10 minutes. Let cool and harden. If desired, use a greased toothpick or skewer to poke a hole while cooling for the ribbon to hang. We just glued the ribbon on later. After the peppermint has cooled, stretch the cookie cutter to release the ornament. Don't push the ornament out, that's how we lost our first batch. Also, be careful. Peppermint shards are SHARP!)

 

We made a traditional gingerbread house this year and added a pretzel log cabin for some variation. (Our first one collapsed due to my shoddy construction, but I asked Joe to pick up more pretzels and frosting and ta-da! It's still standing!) I love making these houses with Cece. We get so sticky and messy but she becomes so focused and engaged. For the pretzel house, we used a cardboard box as the structure to stick the pretzels to. We also discovered that dipping pretzels in frosting and eating them is a brilliant idea.

 

 

 

The last crafty thing I wanted to do this year was create personalized stockings for the girls. I perused Pinterest but didn't find anything I loved so these were basically made on a whim. I recovered some dollar store stockings with sparkly fabric and then hot-glued for quite a significant amount of time. It was the one thing I didn't let Cece help with (because glue gun burns HURT). For not having much of a plan, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.

Now that all of this crafting is done, I'm excited to move on to more activities and celebrating. I hope you are enjoying the beginning of December as much as we are!