We did our Gingerbread Houses on Christmas Eve this year. I think we have done that for a couple of years now, so it may be becoming a tradition. I like doing it then because John can help, and he is much better at manipulating that unwieldy icing than I am. I have bought pre-baked gingerbread houses every year, but this year I took it a step further and bough "pre-assembled" gingerbread houses. The only downfall was that one of them was quite broken, but John was able to re-assemble it with the icing. The downfall of doing them on Christmas Eve is of course that you don't have them as decor for the whole season, but it is a very nice Christmas Eve activity to do during the day.
Charlotte was the perfect "Who" this Christmas:
"All the Who's down in Who-ville, the tall and the small..."
Another Christmas Eve activity": caroling and bringing warm dinner to a lonely neighbor:
Classic Santa Claus Cooties:
Our Thrift Store had a good supply of stockings, so it was fun to let the kids each get one to match their personalities:
Jeffrey quite loved his "Grinch" stocking, particularly because he realized it was the longest and thought that might mean he would get the most stuff in it. It did keep losing all it's little bells, but what can ya do.
There were several cute stockings that we were having a hard time choosing from for Rowan, but when we saw this small one monogrammed with an "r", we knew that fate had intervened:
I think you'll have no trouble identifying which pile of loot belongs to which kid;
Arabelle also got a mattress this year, which was weird, but she needed one for her new bed (she had been using a crib-size mattress on a twin-size bed for a while), and somehow John found himself promising the week before Christmas that Santa would bring her a mattress, so then we had to scramble around right before Christmas and make sure that "Santa" did not break his promise.
I did 100% of my shopping online this Christmas, almost exclusively from Amazon and Zulily. I ordered this "pad" from Zulily (a discount website with "deals of the day") at what I thought was an amazing price, only $9.99, regularly $49.99. It was clearly designed just for kids and I looked at the picture at what looked like a selection of kid games on it's screen. I knew for fifty bucks you wouldn't be getting anything quality, but I figured that reasonably someone could provide an electronic thing with a few pre-programmed kid games for that price (similar to a Leapster but with the games built-in). I thought it would be just perfect for three-year-old Charlotte since she is always wanting to play with Jeffrey's pads but is too young for all the games he has. At ten bucks, it could break in a few months or weeks and that would be fine. Anyway, I asked John to take it out and set it up on Christmas Eve. When he took it out of the packaging he was horrified to realize that it was basically a hollow piece of plastic with a sticker, like those fake kid cell phones you can find in the checkout line at Wal-Mart. You can touch the icons (they don't change anything since they are all part of one big sticker on a piece of plastic), and someone with a very hard to understand Chinese accent will say a letter of the alphabet or number. John couldn't quite believe how I could have mistakenly bought something so stupid. I went and found the same product on Amazon and read the reviews and found that many others had been similarly duped. No way in heck this thing was ever worth $49.99. I had intended to give it to Charlotte, but we decided it was more appropriate for Rowan, so now Rowan has his own pad. As this thing was going to be one of Charlotte's "main presents", I bumped a few of Arabelle and Jeffrey's presents down since I had obscenely over-purchased for them. The irony of the whole "Christmas Eve Crisis" is that Charlotte saw Rowan playing with it and went and grabbed it, and it has turned out to be one of her favorite toys, simple and Chinese thought it is. She actually seems to enjoy copying the Chinese-accented lady: "One, two, three, fo".
