Christmas Preparations

Even though I haven't been posting much about what we did in preparation for Christmas, we were busy with lots of activities. Some of them I even remembered to take pictures of! Although I'm a little late posting this, I wanted to share some of the ways we "anticipated" Christmas this year. The boys were entranced with the way Papa decorated the window in the door between the mudroom and the rest of the house:


We made salt-dough ornaments for the tree, some free-form and some cut out with cookie cutters:


Ethan really enjoyed coloring his gingerbread boys and girls with markers. I was a little surprised, since he's never liked coloring. I guess we just never tried the right medium before! Oh, and the two on the lower left side are Alex's.


They've helped with baking and candy-making, and really liked the popcorn balls!


One of the other things we tried this year was a book countdown. I gathered up all of our Christmas books and got enough more from the library so we had one for each day between the 1st and the 24th. Then I wrapped them and they took turns choosing and opening a book for their bedtime story each night. They really enjoyed that!