Christmasing

Christmas Eve. The kids were so into dressing up and acting out the Christmas story this year. Nina was an angel and a wise man. Ben was Joseph, a shepherd, and a wise man. Sophie was Mary and a wise man. I was Herod's scribe and the costumer. Adrian was the narrator, Herod, and a donkey (Adrian gets stuck with the most interesting parts every year!:)). I love this picture we got of our 3 wise men.

Right before the bedlam of the picture below.

This is after the Christmas bomb dropped in our family room.

Christmas picnic by the tree. My favorite tradition.

Finishing our Christmas puzzle.

After all that we went to Gulliver's Travels, which was hilarious. We had a great day and I'm so glad I got to spend it with my favorite people in all the world. Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas

Decembering Part 2: The Food

Let's be honest, part of the wonderfulness of December is the food. Oh the food. We have received the most scrumptious goodies from neighbors and friends and we ourselves have been making a bunch of treats. Have you tried mint chocolate covered Ritz crackers?? Oh man! So yummy. We got a homemade gingerbread house kit from my sweet friend Heidi and it was so fun to put that together. It actually has candy glass windows. Heidi is a star. Did I mention that it smells so good too. Every time I pass by the finished gingerbread house I make sure I inhale deeply. Today we've been preparing for our Christmas Eve dinner. Adrian is making another brined turkey - yum. And we are going to have all our favorite sides including deviled eggs and crescent rolls. Tomorrow evening we will also be making our traditional Finnish Ribbon Cookies for Santa Claus which of course are pretty much just butter and sugar. Wonderfulness I say! Dr. Oz says that we all eat about 600 extra calories a day from Thanksgiving through New Years and I believe him, but wow isn't it a delicious time of year. Starting Jan. 1st I'll be good and eat a lot less butter, cream cheese, sugar, and did I say butter? No wonder people get depressed in January!

Making corn flake wreaths for a Family Home Evening treat. Ben and Nina loved decorating them with red hots and m&ms, but were not even going to try anything covered in green goo. Adrian, Sophie, and I loved them.

The gingerbread house. See how it even has 2 levels?! The kids had so much fun decorating it.

Me with a pan of hot crescent rolls. Mmmm bread... You can see my quirky hot pads. Yes, they are welding gloves and I love them!

Decembering

We have been having a relaxing December at home. The kids are out of school now and we are spending our days playing (Sophie is teaching Ben how to play chess), reading, coloring (Nina), watching shows, and taking the occasional outing. It's been really lovely.

Our tree is decorated and we are enjoying our quiet evenings watching shows with the Christmas tree lights on. Last night was A Christmas Story and The Blind Side.

Here's the kids in their Christmas Sunday outfits. I love that Ben is wearing real ties now (well kid size real ties).

Thanksgiving At Last

I can't believe I'm just now posting about Thanksgiving. For the first time in my life I made a real honest to goodness Thanksgiving dinner for my family. This was made possible by Adrian agreeing to do the turkey. And I mean the whole turkey. I never had to touch it at all. Awesome. There is just something strange with me and turkeys. I love to eat them. Turkey is yummy. But even wrapped in plastic they are still huge dead animals (sorry for that visual) and I just can't get my head around touching one. Maybe someday I'll cross that bridge (with gloves on), but for now Adrian is the turkey guy in our house and he made one beautiful, flavorful, moist turkey! He made Alton Brown's, of Good Eats fame, brined turkey and wow it turned out great! He also made the sweet potato casserole this year which was also very good. I made everything else. Here's a link to our menu.

So we spent the morning cooking happily (really it was fun) and then around 1:30 we sat down to our feast. Everyone had their favorites. Mine was the deviled eggs, Adrian the sweet potato casserole, Sophie the sweet cherry cheeseball with crackers, Ben the cranberry sauce (jellied kind from the can of course), and Nina's favorite was the turkey and mashed potatoes (she's a traditional kinda gal). We ooohhed and aaahhed over Adrian's turkey and took pictures and stuffed our faces. Wow it was all so good. But we barley made a dent in all the food. (We had leftovers for days.)After our feast and some napping we headed to Tangled for our traditional Thanksgiving movie. That was so cute. I really enjoyed it and so did the whole family, though I'm thinking Nina loved it just a little more than anyone else. Then we came home and had pie (ooh that pumpkin cheesecake was good!) and let everyone pick a game to play. Nina chose the Ice Cream Scoop game (that's a given if you let Nina pick a game). Ben chose Sorry which honestly is amazing because every time we play that game he ends up getting his feelings hurt, but still it's his favorite. Then Nina and Ben went to bed and Sophie challenged Adrian and I to Harry Potter Clue. That is a FUN game . And Sophie won! And then rubbed it in telling Adrian and I that she is "highly logical" and that's why she won. (Hermione said that in the HP7 movie and I think Sophie took it to heart.) The nerve. Really though it was fun.

Thanksgiving was awesome. I guess it really is worth it to put in all the work of cooking for a lovely family day full of delicious food and fun times spent together. I think this years Thanksgiving is somewhere in the top 5 days I'd sign up for the Groundhog Day treatment. Hope your Thanksgiving was great too!

Christmas Art Presentation

Whew. Last night I gave an art history presentation on the life of Christ in art through the ages for my Relief Society's Christmas meeting (formerly known as Enrichment). I still can't believe I did it and that it's over. It was about a 45? 50? minute presentation, but mixed in with the art stuff were verses of scriptures read by my friend Ganelle, our RS president.

I'm having a hard time today because I still feel like I should be locked in the den studying and researching the images. It was a lot of work. I'm not going to lie and say it was a breeze (at first I had about 140 images, but I narrowed it down to about 90 and I didn't talk about all of them lest you think I bored my poor Relief Society to death), but I can honestly say I really enjoyed the time I spent preparing. It felt like I was back at BYU studying for a test or writing a paper and it was wonderful. I love art. I really really do. I especially love finding connections in art. I did this one part where I compared images of Christ's birth and it is so neat to see how that tradition has changed through time. There are some really neat recent nativity paintings. I did the same thing with images of "The Madonna and Child" and "Christ with the Children" and it was awesome (for me at least). Also I got to talk about "3 Magi in a Taco" so I was totally stoked about that! (This is the one pictured above - its real name is "The Magi Asleep" by Gislebertus, a 12th centurey stone carver.) Does anyone say totally stoked anymore? And I got a laser pointer! I actually got to talk about art with a laser pointer. Ha ha! Cross that one off the bucket list! But yeah, I did feel a little like I was going to pass out the whole time that I was talking. And I shook like a leaf and you could tell because my shaking made the laser pointer shake too. Most of all though it was amazing to prepare all these images of Christ's life during this Christmas season. I've been finding images of Christ and looking at images of Christ so much and it has centered and focused my thoughts on the Savior. It was a great experience. So even though I was a big shivering ball of anxiety I am so glad I had the opportunity to do this presentation. Now I guess I have to start cleaning my house and feeding my family again. Ah well, locking myself in the den was fun while it lasted. :)