Christmas

Growing up, we never had Christmas dinner.  I never knew that people ate Turkey on Christmas until I was an adult.  

We had Christmas breakfast! 

We still do.  When we get together with family on Christmas we eat our traditional Christmas breakfast (even if it is 6:00 at night) and it is delicious.

We have started our own tradition of beginning  our festivities with a nice meal on Christmas eve.  We use the goblets, real dishes and silverware (ok, it isn't really silver, just metal) instead of our plastic plates and sporks. 

After dinner, we usually do a nativity, but we had almost all just performed in one that afternoon, so we skipped it that evening and jumped to opening a present.

We each got to open one and then off to bed for the kids.  Trip fell asleep with Zelda.

Daphne stayed up to help.  We had brought all the "Little People" down from the attic and cleaned them up.  Daphne arranged them for Zelda.

She also used the duplo blocks we got out of the attic to build a house.  It was very cute.

Then she went to bed and Santa came.

 

We had to spred the socks out, so there was enough room for everyone.

Santa even covered up everything with blankets, so no one could see what they got until mom and dad got up and we could see their reactions.  What a nice Santa.

Daphne was the most excited about the bird cage she got.  It meant that she got to get a pet parakeet.

We also had a present under the tree for everyone from God.  It was a reminder of the gift of his Son, that brings with him eternal life, which gift is the greatest of all the gifts of God.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Nativity Play

On December 24th, we helped put on a Nativity program for our church Christmas dinner.  Here is the cast.

 

Here are just my little cuties.  Rez is Joseph, Daphne is Mary, Ocean is a Shepherd, and Julius and Harvey are sheep.

Sheep Costumes

I needed three sheep costumes for our nativity that we were involved in.  I had an idea and here is how it goes.

 I started with a plain black t-shirt (you could use white, but I had an abundance of black on hand) 

and some black cut off sweat pants.

I covered some small pillows with plastic trash bags and put the shirts and pants on them to fill them out a bit.  You can see below that I cut the shorts even shorter.

We used some 

since that is what was on sale at the store, but I could have used just regular batting.

We made it into balls,

Then we used spray glue

to spray one side

and put the balls onto the gluey clothes.

until they were really densely covered.  And repeated on the other side.

They were fluffy enough they stood on their own.

Here is how it turned out.

I did have to reglue a lot of the areas once we moved the costumes around, so make sure that you use lots of glue.  

Manger

We needed a manger to go with our Nativity and since I couldn't find anything around the house that would work, we made one out of Hazelnut shoots (they grow like weeds in our yard) and string.  

First I cut a bunch of shoots the same length, about 2 ft.

Then Daphne and I lashed them together.  One of us holding while the other did the string.

We did 2 x's first, then lashed cross pieces across the center and up the sides.

Lastly, we put stabilizing ones on the bottom .

We filled it with long needle pine needles, since they are also abundantly available in our yard.  It made a great substitute for straw.

Nativity

Along with getting ready for Christmas this year, our family was asked to help out with the Nativity for the Church Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve.  (They picked us because we could cover almost all of the parts with one family.)  

Ocean was the shepherd.

Rez was Joseph

Daphne was Mary

Harvey, Mo and Julius were the sheep.

I was the narrator, Trip was in the Angel choir and Zelda was in the audience.

We made the costumes out of old sheets, some upholstery fabric, rope/cording and Hazelnut shoots from our yard.

The sheep were a little more involved and I am gong to make another post about there costumes.

The Gecko

Harvey has amazing athletic skills.  His latest trick is climbing the door jam.  He is so good at it he was given the name "The Gecko" by his brother.  He has been climbing a lot lately and the other day when he had his shirt off, I noticed that he has very well defined pectoral and deltoid muscles.  What 5 year old has well defined muscles?

Here he is in action.

Gingerbread (Not Really)

We made gingerbread houses (only we used graham crackers) at my sister's today.

We all had a lot of fun, and not only because we got to eat candy.

We tried putting the royal frosting in decorating bags, but it was too stiff to squeeze out well.

My sister and her oldest son working hard.

Julius and his cousin tested out the candy for us.

We moved to just using knives and our fingers to put the icing on.

 Daphne finished her house.

That is a lot of icing Mo.

Trip helping Julius.

My cute nephew.

Ocean and Lily working on their houses.

My sister decorating the house Rez abandoned.  

Here are all the houses.

Daphne's house.

Julius's house (he had help from Dad).

Lily's house.

And the other side.

Ocean's house.

This was Harvey's house.  He slipped on his chair, and fell on it, smashing it flat.

 

So, we rebuilt it in to this.

On the way home, he dropped it and it broke to pieces again.

Here is Mo's house.  He was so proud of it.  He was holding on his lap on the ride home and Trip went over a bumpy stretch of road.  The first bump lifted the house off the plate, the second bump smashed it flat.  He was not happy.