This post is long. Very long. And in my desire to keep posts mostly chronological, it's holding everything up, because so much happens at this time of year, and it takes a while to write it all down! I've broken it into sections, but decided it should all go into one post anyway. So here goes. :)
First up: BAKING!! I do really enjoy baking, but most of the year I don't find or make the time. Christmas is the exception, and this year, I had some special baking to do...
My Very First From-Scratch Gingerbread houses! Last year, my nanny family gave me this cookie cutter, and I was on pins and needles waiting for Christmas this year so that I could use it. I found a very yummy and easy gingerbread recipe online, and made batch after batch of it...one batch turned out to be enough for each house, but of course I also wanted gingerbread that I could eat right away, and I made gingerbread cookies with my nanny family as well. I used up all my ginger in a flash...and I didn't have one of those dinky little containers most stores sell, either...
I bought a container of meringue powder, using that to whip up a bunch of royal icing; I also bought much more candy than I actually needed...but I'd expected to be able to decorate houses with the Munch's Auntie B and her kids, and had gotten the extra intending that they would use some too. But then they were sick the day of, and it was too close to Christmas to reschedule, so we were on our own... :(
The Munch and I still had a blast working on our houses. This was hers. She especially loves jelly beans, and put more of those on than anything else. :) And of course when it came time to add the gummy bear occupants, she HAD to have yellow ones!
This was mine. I've ALWAYS wanted to do a house like this. My mom has a cookbook with a candy house in it that's patterned similarly, and I literally spent hours drooling over that when I was a kid. So when it came time to design my own house, naturally I opted for twizzler brick and wafer shingles to try to get that look. :D I also decided I didn't like the chimneys that the cookie cutter had made...and then I accidentally dropped something on one of them and broke it... So at first I wasn't going to do any chimney, but then I got an inspiration. :) It was really yummy to eat later, too.
Daddy used the many cookies I made (that were left over after making the party favors) to make a very decorative tray. Included here are peppermint meringues, gingerbread, sugar cookies, dyed chocolate chips, and peppermint kiss cookies. I also made a couple different types of fudge, but they got their own serving container.
Finally, there was one other baked item I did this year that I've never done before, and it was in large part brought on by the fact that I still had that mistake cake from the Munch's birthday (the one that should have been orange except I forgot the dye) waiting for me in the freezer. It needed using sooner rather than later, and what better time to have a cake than for Jesus' birthday! :) I had a bunch of royal icing left over from the gingerbread houses too, so I used that to make flowers and what I hoped would be a stand-up arch...but the arch broke--I didn't give it enough time to set. I did have fun playing with decorating tips and figuring out how to make holly though. :) I put strawberry jam between the layers (because every cake is better with jam filling), and used a buttercream recipe from a book my mom gave me for Christmas (such great timing), and we all sang and then thoroughly enjoyed the birthday treat. :)
I imagine you're wondering how, with a baby, I was able to do all this? This is how. :) She was a little angel almost the whole time. It must have been all the yummy sweetness in the air...
Then there were the decorations to put up, some of which didn't go up until the week before, the month flew by that quickly...
The gingerbread houses, along with a little foam tree I made when a friend came for a visit and suggested playing with crafting stuffs.
My puzzle houses...still maimed from last year's kitten attacks...And I still don't know what to do about that...
My tree. I do love the silver and gold on a tree.
The Mini's first ornament, a gift from one of my aunts.
Remembering my furry babies. This was the second Christmas without Pan, and the third without Ebony.
My advent, put up high this year to keep Stevie and Graham off it. They are such awful chewers-of-plastic!! The high placement meant it didn't get played with as much this year, but the Munch still looked forward to opening another box every night.
I thought the nutcrackers should keep my Falcon company. It makes perfect sense to me. :)
The counter decorations, including a lovely bouquet from a friend.
My village, which was the last thing to go up this year...it very nearly didn't, and I forgot to do the foil-ice river this year. But being the last item to go up, it was also the last to go down, and I enjoy seeing it on my desk. :)
Then it was time for the many celebrations and times with peoples:
My family, taken the Sunday before Christmas. The Mini's dress is sized for 9-months, and the Munch's for 6-year-olds...But of the two, I'd say the Mini's dress is the more suspect...she normally is still fitting clothing made for her age, and so far has only been near the 50th percentile for size. A far cry from the Munch's consistent 90/95th.
The Sisters, taken a little later on Sunday at home. This picture was NOT easy to get. Mini had decided she was done for the day and wanted a nap, but that meant I would have taken off that little dress (it has a rose on the collar that gets in the way)...But at least I got one good shot. :)
The Tuesday before Christmas, Little K's family came into town and joined us for some games, lunch, and conversation...They're expecting a third little girl soon, and their second, pictured here, was loving the Munch's dress-up stuff.
We held our 4th Christmas Eve Breakfast and had about 30 friends show up for it! It was so much fun. As usual, Daddy did all the cooking that morning. I do so love to have the morning off. :)
A few of my lovely ladies who came.
And some of my (more or less) girls. :)
This boy cracks me up. He loves--LOVES--statistics. In this particular photo, he's having his dad write down the alphabet according to frequency of use. He spent much of his time instructing all of us about which letters are used the most or least, and what number placement for use they each fall into...And I've already forgotten prettymuch everything he told me, but I'll bet you HE hasn't forgotten. :)
At 1 pm Christmas Eve day, we were all by ourselves, and would be for the next day and a half. I don't say this often, but just being completely by ourselves was wonderful. We've done a few Christmases here now, and we've started falling into some regular routines, or traditions if you will...For one, we eat breakfast for dinner on Christmas Eve: leftovers from the morning, mainly because we put so much thought into the breakfast event that we kinda forget we need to do other meals too. ;) For another, we have some order to present opening...Christmas Eve is a time for any gifts that were sent from family or friends. Christmas morning is when we open gifts from each other.
So that evening, we sat down to see what had come in the mail...
These were a couple of the items from my family to Daddy and I...
The Mini's collection from my family--That elephant has become a favorite toy that I have dubbed 'Crinkl-E'...because it crinkles and is an elephant. I know, I'm so original... ;)
The Munch's collection from my family. She immediately started asking for a bath...
But she and Daddy played her new game Trouble (from Big D) instead. :) She caught on pretty quickly. She's really starting to get into games now, so this was perfect for her.
Then came Christmas morning...Time for stockings and family presents! First up...a little goody I found last minute at Target. OH, how she LOVES lollipops!
And a couple movies...We'd borrowed Big D's copy of Planes a little while back and watched it as a family, and she loved it so, so, so much...it was pretty obvious that it needed to be purchased for her. And we decided, even though we hadn't seen it, that we would also get Planes 2. Which (again despite the scary parts) she also really, really loved. My future pilot? :)
This year I got all the kiddos in my life a book of some sort or other...I had a couple different books in mind for the Munch, but when I saw this book 'suggested' on Amazon, I knew it had to join our collection before any others. It is a GREAT book, and not just because it has giraffes and dancing...There's some good social lessons in it too. ;)
The Mini of course didn't do much other than watch us, but she needed a 'First Christmas' picture while we were all doing presents. ;)
As usual, Daddy and I did our scavenger hunt, and took each other all over the main part of the house for it. This year, I got a lot of chocolate. A LOT of chocolate. Like, almost ALL chocolate. Did I mention Daddy got me chocolate? And all of it dark, except the Toblerone, which is lovely as it is. He knows what I like. :D He also gave me a great game that we've played often with friends...more on that in a minute.
Daddy didn't get as much candy, because I found movies for him instead. I also gave him a great big bag of jelly beans that got forgotten in this picture, and which made him very happy as he'd been lamenting for all the jelly beans he'd been missing out on--The Munch got some in her stocking, we used so many for the houses, etc. But the big one was the game *I* got for *him*...
So, story time... The day after Thanksgiving, while Daddy and the Munch were at the circus, I was hanging with the friend who'd joined us for the holiday, and the subject of Christmas gifts came up. I could not for the life of me think of what to get him this year. But through the course of conversation, I had an epiphany...We'd played Dominion once or twice with some friends this past year, and he's LOVED it. So I quickly got on Amazon (where I prettymuch got everything this year, and WOW was my shopping easy!), and snatched up a copy. The next week, we were able meet up with the friends who own that game, and I got worried--if we played Dominion, Daddy might think of getting it for ME. So I quickly texted my friend asking her not to get that game out...hoping he'd forget about it, right? Not so much...When we got there that evening and he was out of the room for a minute, I was told that HE had texted her husband asking for details about Dominion, because he was indeed looking into getting it for me for Christmas. Oh dear... Well, that evening, we played Qwirkle first, then Dominion. Which turned out to be a perfect segue into a driving home conversation in which I told him how much more I really, really would like Qwirkle instead of Dominion... It kinda spoiled the surprise, since we both essentially knew from that moment on what we'd be getting for Christmas, but at least we didn't have to return anything! And we have enjoyed both games considerably. :)
Anywho, back to Christmas day... The Munch enjoyed her morning and much of the candy in her stocking very, very much. Too much, in fact. Later that day, she started complained that her tummy was hurting. A couple hours after that, she was rather quiet in her room, and I went in to check on her...and got a nose-full of vomit-smell...The poor kiddo had barfed all over herself and her bed, and was sitting there with this pitiful 'what do I do now?' look.
But hey, it meant she got to take that bath she was asking about the day before, and try out the light-making toy her great-aunt and uncle sent her! And thankfully, the illness was short-lived, and not related to the flu that had been going around right before Christmas...Perhaps she's learned her lesson about eating too much candy at once now? Not likely. ;)
There was one other thing that happened this Christmas that doesn't really fall into any of the happy little categories I've made but still warrants being mentioned. The Monday evening before Christmas, 2 days before we planned to hold our big breakfast bash and only hours before our other friends were coming in the morning, we discovered that our house had been tagged. We had big, bright, red letters scrawled along the front of it, and what was more, the tagging went up and down the street--the taggers hit fences, other buildings, bushes, the sidewalk, anything they felt would make a good, open 'canvas'--but ours was by far the most obvious and glaring, being a white background with nothing between it and the street. We weren't quite sure when this had happened, since we don't use the front entrance regularly...all we knew was that now, in addition to a hideous front yard (everything is dead and brown and awful), we now had a hideous front facade, and there was precious little we could do about it. I ranted a little about it on facebook, and a friend told me to call the police and alderman and report it. So I did, and the police, after taking down the info, transferred me to a city graffiti removal service--At which point I learned that they strip the tagging for no charge! Of course, it being so close to Christmas, I really couldn't expect the tagging to get removed before our party...
Except that sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, it did! We never even heard them... The first of our friends to arrive that morning said she'd seen my fb post and had been prepared to see the tagging...except it wasn't there any more! I couldn't believe it, and rushed out in stocking feet to see. On that particular day, in the lighting we had, it was completely gone. You can see faint markings in this picture, but that morning, it was fully erased, and it was THE most awesome feeling in the world. My little Christmas miracle? We'll still have to paint over it when it gets a bit warmer, but I was and am grateful for another of God's little "I got this" reminders. :)
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