Christmas: A Holiday with one spelling

My munchkins were so cute this year crafting away.  Logan made chocolate covered pretzels that he added to some...um....special trail mix (3 kids of marshmallows, banana chips, almonds, peppermint pieces, it was odd).  He was very proud.  Riley helped me scan his artwork and make a calendar on snapfish.  It turned out so awesome! Savannah Lynn made tie-dyed soap.  All three made candy necklaces and cookie mix in a jar for various friends and family.  It was cute and it was fun.  I tried to cut back on the number of presents.  It didn't work.  I forget they have 2 insane grandmothers who love buying stuff.

Yeah.  That's our "downsized" room of junk.

But, before we got to that, there was Christmas Eve.  Despite knowing better, I agreed to have Christmas Eve in Springfield.  6 Flags Over Jesus (my loving knickname for our mega-church) was "sold" out of free tickets, so I gave ours back so someone else could have a seat.  I just have come to embrace the fact that my crazy self gets angry when I'm stressed, and I knew that I would be stressed Christmas eve.  Anyway, driving up to get to Springfield I was freaking out and crying, we got to the Lutheran Church of Silence at 6:45 to be sure we'd get seats and Service didn't start until 7:30 (not 7 like we originally thought), the kids were exhausted by 8, service didn't end until 9:15, Savannah was crying in the car and fell asleep, Austin insisted on going back to my brother's house for dessert, so Savannah and I stayed out in the car while they went in- it wasn't great.

As a funny aside, on Tuesday, Austin met another new VP at his work who happened to be sitting behind us at Christmas Eve Service! Wheee!! It's always good when you have to ask your work superior "Did our overtired children drive you nuts?"

Christmas morning (is it morning if the sun isn't up?) started with lighting our Advent Candles and singing Happy Birthday to baby Jesus.

Yeah, it's still dark outside.  When I was little I hated that I had to wait until 6:30 for Kevin to be allowed to wake my parents up because that meant he just drove me nuts until then.  (True story- Kevin woke me up every 15 minutes on Christmas Eve until he was 14 and started OD-ing on NyQuil.)

Grammy and Papa were on time, but we had to wait for Uncle Kevin and Lauren, so we got a few pictures:

(Still dark.  Very very dark.) Check out my special snowflakes on the windows, btw.  Anne (the nice MIL) sent them to me early so I could have them up with my decorations.  They're very beautiful and quite delicate! So far the kids haven't ripped them to shreds, though, so I have hope!

Breakfast was Blueberry French Toast Bake with Cream Cheese.  It was phenomenal.
-2 loaves egg challah, chunked.  Yes, chunked is a technical term.
-12 eggs, beaten
-1 cup heavy cream (I did not call this diet French Toast)
-1 cup milk
-1/3 cup maple syrup
-2 8oz blocks of cream cheese, frozen and chunked.  Yup, we're chunking again.
-1 1/2 cups frozen blueberries.
Mix eggs, cream, milk, syrup.  Add blueberries, cream cheese, and challah chunks.  No challah? You could use panetonne, brioche, or another sturdy, slightly dry bread.  Or, you could stop hating and find some challah.  Put it in the fridge overnight.

Grease a 13x9 pan.  Dump in the purple mess you think looks horrible and unedible.  It'll bake up toasty and gorgeous, so don't worry. While it bakes for 1 hour at 350, mix the following in a sauce pan and bring to a boil until syrupy:
-1 cup water
-1 cup frozen blueberries
-1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
-3T butter

In an hour, your French Toast will have baked up and gotten super tall like a freaking souffle.  It's okay, you used 12 eggs.  When you take it out of the oven, it'll collapse and fall down, like a souffle.  Let it set for 10 minutes so the cream cheese isn't like liquid lava, and then serve with the blueberry syrup.  I think this would easily make 2 slightly less packed 13x9's if you're concerned about the amount you're cramming into the baking dish.  We ate every last bite over the course of the day, with people shunning lunch to have more.  This will definitely be made again soon!

Dinner was pretty standard, prime rib cooked in rosemary, dijon, and red wine, served with horseradish cream (2 parts sour cream to 1 part mayo to as much horseradish as your peeps happen to like.  We like ours spicy.) and garlic mash.  I tried something new this year and poached the sliced potatoes and garlic in enough cream (I used 1/2 a cup) and chicken stock (I used a box of low sodium) to just cover them.  You scoop out the soft veggies and mash them, using any remaining liquid if you need it (I didn't).  These were the BEST mashed potatoes ever.  EVER EVER.  So creamy and flavorful!  There were orange glazed string beans with candied pecans, spinach salad with winter fruit, fresh rolls, and red velvet cake.  It was tasty :) I have to admit, though, after Hannukah dinner, a dinner for friends, and Christmas dinner all in one week, even I am a little cooked out!!

This year was good for me as we made a conscious effort to focus more on Jesus and less on anything that typically frustrates mommy (like ZOMG SANTA! for an entire month. They know, they're okay.) and it was so beautiful for me.  I loved our devotional this year and we'll definitely use it again, and I especially loved that my reader and beginning reader could help share the message with us.

These flowers were purchased for our Friday night dinner with friends and lasted until Christmas, which is really good for tulips! They're gorgeous and it turns out that one of my presents from Austin was a year of once a month flower delivery from my favorite local florist.  I've always said that if I won the lottery I'd buy a house with a yard, a minivan, and weekly flowers and then I'd stick the rest in savings and investments....apparently he was listening!

Craft Tutorial: Advent Countdown

Quite possibly the easiest craft you'll ever do! You could easily alter this project to be a countdown to Hannukah (use blue and white peppermint patties!) or Easter (pink, yellow, and green wrapped candy), or even a child's birthday.  If you prefer not to use candy, a small toy or trinket would fit, too! You could also easily dress this craft up (Look at THESE!!), but we planned this craft for our CC friends to come over and do, so I wanted it to be easy enough for the kids to do fairly independently.

Here's what you'll need:

Ribbon (curling or fabric, either is fine), number printouts, scripture printouts (optional, but why not!), scissors, a one-hole punch, plastic wrap, mixed Christmas wrapped Hershey Kisses.  I like using my ironing board for this craft so that I can lay the plastic wrap out, but a long kitchen table would be fine, too!  If you have a stampin up circle cutter that can fit around your numbers, all the better!!

This process could not be any easier! Spread out your plastic wrap.  I've found that for 3-4 kids (so 3-4 kisses in each bundle) I need about 5.5 feet of plastic wrap.  If you need extra, it's easy to add by tying it into a bundle and it sticking to the other piece, so no worries if you're short.  For 2 kids I think 4.5 feet is enough.  At the top of your wrap, use several colors of ribbon to tie a bow, using one piece to tie a loop so you can hang your countdown up!

Next, bundle in one piece of candy per child per night, tying securely under each bundle with ribbon.  For an Advent countdown, you obviously need to have enough "bundles" to get from 1-25!

Next, cut out your numbers.  I got mine from HERE and I think they're so cute! (Plus it's a free download!) You could mount these on Christmas paper, or you can put them on top of folded scripture cards, or you can just use them alone.  Hole punch each card once so that you can thread it onto the ribbon between each section.  The number goes under the candy it goes with so that when you untie it to take the number off, you get the candy above it, and then next number and its candy stay securely tied!

I love how it looks for two kids because you can put the kisses in a diamond shape and they fit so nicely!! For more kids it's a little harder to bundle nicely, but it works out!!

Fun!  Some other versions that work, too, include printing numbered cards with quotes on them, or glueing your numbers onto folded scripture verses (we did these at a church I worked at):

After the jump, you can get versions of my devotional scripture readings to go along with the countdown, or a more "meditational" version I designed to be a little more "seeker friendly" with some quotes, carol verses, and a little less scripture.  I printed these using a 4.5 inch margin on the left so that they could be folded over into cards with the number on the front.

Happy Crafting! 

In Which We Purge Christmas....And Also Elf Away.

I seriously backed off of Christmas this year.  In the past I've let it way over stress me, mainly because I've tried to make Christmas the major production that my mother (who I love, please don't get me wrong) makes it.  She did such a great job of stressing, decorating, baking, polishing, tweaking, wrapping and making magic for us.  With my kids, though, I've never really wanted Christmas to be quite the way it was when I grew up, even though it was perfectly magical. I really want our Christmas to be about family and tradition and most of all about Jesus.  Over the past few years I've really frustrated myself trying to make Christmas what I want it to be, and "competing" with my mom, who will buy 3,000 presents by the time it's all said and done :)

This year, mainly because I'm totally burned out on other areas of life, I really let it go.  I let go of competing with her on the number of presents we buy, because honestly, our kids play with 3 or 4 of them and then forget about them.  I let go of freaking out about stringing 4,000,000 strands of lights in the front of our house because it's always frustrating to me that Austin doesn't "man up and hang the lights" so I did wreaths with bows and called it a day.  I think next year I'll buy pre-lit wreaths and be perfectly happy.  I let go of going to as many events and parties as we could cram in, and instead I filled our days with family projects.  I kept our advent devotions.  I kept the tree.  I kept secret shopping trips and the nativity scenes and ice skating. Also, the homemade thank you cards, but only because we really like painting things.

I let go of individually made cards and got free ones from Shutterfly for writing about them on my PWC Moms blog. And you know, somewhere in the purging, I found the joy of Christmas again.  My kids and I have enjoyed the snow, and the reading, and the making treats for other people.  We haven't stressed or run all over the place any more than we normally do, and I've actually worked to cut that down, too, so that we can savor the season.

I still think that Christmas has been great so far for us.  By not deciding that I have to do the nine million things I've made myself in the past, we've allowed ourselves to do what is special for us this year.  For example, my kids apparently love gingerbread houses.  This is the 5th one we've done.  It's got chocolate rocks on the sides.  How awesome is that!

 I've also tried not to freak out so much about the baking.  I bake with our kids all the time, but during Christmas I want things to be perfect, so I tend to micromanage or do it myself.  So this year, since I know it's really fun and special for them, I've picked things they can do.  We did chocolate dipped pretzels tonight, which ended up with around 6 different non-matching toppings on them but are still cute, and we also did gingerbread man cookies (I told you they love the gingerbread!!) I also decided that I'd chill out on the monstrous cookie platters we end up doing for our neighbors and share some of our home-canned goodies instead, so I've started getting some salsa and peach butter ready to go out.  We're caroling tomorrow (keeper!!) so we'll hand out goodies to our neighbors on Saturday.

 I think that for next year there are a few more things I'll bring back, but for this year, this minimalist Christmas has really helped me figure out what I really want to have in our family's holiday, and what I, and our kids, don't need to be happy and joyful during the holidays.