Pre-Christmas traditions

The kids had an entire week off of school leading up to Christmas. It was frigid cold and we were mostly home home home inside together. That gave us plenty of time to do our favorite family pre-Christmas traditions. We keep some traditions from mine or Jeff's childhood, but my favorites are always the ones that we have created especially for our own family. We didn't start out our marriage with a list of "traditions to start"; our traditions are more organic--they mostly grew out of "that one time that we did that fun thing." When I thought about it, I realized that most of the traditions I grew up loving came about the same way. That's what makes traditions special. Three of our favorite homegrown pre-Christmas traditions include: Santa Jeff visiting, gingerbread house decorating, and block building.

SANTA

For family home evening last week, Jeff dusted off the Santa suit I made him last year, shoved a pillow up his shirt, and HO HO HO'd merrily at his children while I attempted to take pictures in the low light (our family room has zero lights in the ceiling, a true plague to my photography). Amber would NOT go near Jeff while he was talking and ho-ho-ho-ing in that fleece beard. It was so funny! She clung to my leg until Jeff lowered his beard and beckoned to her in his normal voice. Even then she took a whole lot of persuading! It is so much fun starting our own traditions, and this is one of my favorite. 

Pillow Santa/skinny Santa. I was laughing my head off at his transformation!

Bahaha, unfair that Jeff had to sit there while I messed with camera settings in an attempt to gather more nonexistent light. But this picture makes me chuckle merrily. That is one authentic stomach.

Gingerbread Houses

Another tradition that we started relatively recently is making gingerbread houses. It was not a childhood tradition for Jeff or me. I'm not exactly sure what inspired me to start this one up because making pretty things out of food has never been my forte, but for one reason or another, we have decorated gingerbread houses at Christmas for the past three or four years. On Thursday, December 22nd, we were all half sick, half cabin-fever-crazy at 4pm. We needed an activity to carry us through till dinnertime. 

With one part of my brain acknowledging my insanity, I suggested that we make gingerbread houses. The kids agreed readily, and we started to get out the supplies, only to discover that we were completely out of graham crackers and I had forgotten to refresh lour stock of decorative candy. Make-it-work-with-what-we-have is our modus operandi around here, so we got creative. Thankfully we had enough leftover bulk Winco candy from last year's graham-house-a-rama, but what to build the house out of? No way was I going to bake actual gingerbread. That would take forever! I discovered half a box of Rice Krispys and some marshmallows in the pantry, and an idea formed: make a rice crispy treat house! We whipped up a big bowl of rice krispy treats, spread the goo nice and thin on a cookie sheet, refrigerated it for a few minutes to firm it up, and then got to work on the construction. 

I sliced strips of RKT (Rice Krispy Treat) and made a rectangle, stacking the pieces like sod. The RKT was too bendy and wimpy to use for a roof, so another scour of the pantry yielded an old box of Triscuits. Our house quickly became a castle with Triscuit towers. We microwaved some marshmallows for glue, and the resulting white stretchy sticky substance was reminiscent of massive spider webs. Trying not to let my mind morph our Christmas gingerbread house [already downgraded to a Rice Krispy castle] into Shelob's lair, we proceeded with the decorating. The melted marshmallows would not spread and I developed a haphazard anchor-and-stretch technique to apply it to the castle. I felt like a general commanding the troops while I told the kids where to put the candies as I stretched long marshmallow strings around the perimeter. Jeff hovered in the background, abnormally concerned about the MESS everyone was making, dumping out candies, knocking things over, and clamoring for tastes, nibbles, and sugar, sugar, sugar. Role reversal! For some reason the mess did not concern me for once, and at last the creation was complete. The kids' bellies were replete with year old-candy and my hands were covered in fast-congealing marshmallow goop. General Shaina put Jeff on camera duty.

Love: Amber's concentration lips in the background.

The entire edifice kept sagging and drooping, and within ten minutes after I stopped pushing it back into position, it collapsed into a sticky mess.

{Traditional post-gingerbread house decorating family picture}

Building

We are a "building toy" family, and every year the kids get a new type of block or building material for Christmas. I can't resist! Building toys are FUN, brainy, and have great play-value. Somehow along the way Christmas break became family building time--we gather a bunch of blocks, bricks, and tracks from the playroom, and build cities, houses, and towers together by the Christmas tree. 

 Amber's lip of thought.

 Amber took off her necklaces and draped them over the blocks she was building with to make them pretty.

 That concentrating lower lip.

 My favorite corner of one particular town is the countryside, complete with book-illustrated backdrops and livestock munching brick block green grass near a tractor in the foreground.

After all of that playing, Jay and Rose like to finish the day off with a sibling sleepover. During their Christmas break so far, they have slept in Jay's bed, on the floor of the playroom, and on the girls' bedroom floor. They load up on blankets, stuffed animals, and random other items and then play an extra hour till 8pm. Jay always stays up till 8, but Rose falls asleep within minutes of her 7pm bedtime. Rose has always needed more sleep than Jay so we have to limit sleepovers. Supply and demand have skyrocketed the value of sibling sleepovers in the White house!