Christmas.Day.2008

Mini pizzas were baked & eaten for lunch & dinner, apple + white chocolate chips + oatflakes muffins were baked in the afternoon to use the remnant of the pink icing (recipe will come soon, I promise) as well as pink sugar soon coming to its "Best Before" date.The boys had woken up very early (06.30am), opened their two presents & morning was spent making games & doing different sorts of housework (me changed the boys' bed linen, had a load of laundry etc) including baking mini pizzas. (which were part of our meals today as mentioned above)I wore Christmas (UK) puddings earrings & pendant I had bought last year at One Elf Etsy shop last year. I just love them to bits. Simple but effective, and so cute !I have compiled all the activities my boys & I did for this past Advent Calendar. (sniff, can't believe it's already over ! U would have loved that there was one for every month !!!) So here it is. Get inspired if you want to, use one of the ideas (just go back in the archives to get a better idea with a photo, if you wish to), or don't read it at all, it's up to you !

{ Our Activity Advent Calendar 2008 }
1 : Print & do a winter maze
2 : Make salt dough snowmen
3 : Stamps
4 : Winter Tic Tac Toe (I made ours with felt)
5 : make paper snowflakes
6 : Read Christmas books & drink cocoa + marshmallows
7 : Draw a winter landscape, and a grown-up sews/makes it with felt, like a felt board
8 : Print & color winter or Christmas themed coloring pages (ours were found online)
9 : Decorate a cardboard wreath with little bits & bobs
10 : Imagine, draw, and make a Christmas themed little book
11 : Make Dot-to-Dot pictures (ours came from a book)
12 : Draw with fabric pens on a square of cotton fabric, and a grown up sews a back, a ribbon & fills it to make an ornament
13 : Activity in the bath
14 : Make (cut windows by a grown up, then paint or draw) cardboard (gingerbread) houses
15 : Bake a cake
16 : Make Finger Puppets. They draw them, you sew them with felt
17 : Make chocolate holiday treats.(our recipe : melt dark chocolate with butter & a bit of cream, in the microwave, and make little circles with it, on parchement paper, then children add pistachios, pine nuts, almonds & pecan nuts (little nuts or dried/candied fruits). Left to dry in a cold place,or better, put them in the fridge)
18 : Make Sun-Catchers, using remnants of self-adhesive rolls (MacTac type), and little squares of colorful tissue papers
19 : Print & laminate Christmas themed bookmarks (our were from Jan Brett's website)
20 : Sort out (and archive) all their drawings/artworks/creations of the current year (coming to an end) Keep the best ones / most loved ones, and make a paper chain garland with all the "rejected" ones.
21 : Print a blank calendar (month by month) & they decorate a blank area on the calendar (ours was at the top)
22 : Play agility games (such as throwing bean bags in a basket) and after several games, they win a little toy. (ours was one Playmobil character)
23 : Decorate a gingerbread house online
24 : Bake & ice sugar cookies

Please don't think I am totally crazy, but I have already started removing Christmas stuff at our place. Not the tree, of course, but little bits here & there. It's something absolutely personal, but once Christmas is over, for me, then I cannot wait a week or more to get everything down. We have the tree a bit early (or a lot, compared to others), and enjoy the festive atmosphere all December long. But once it's over, it's over. Time to make room for a new year. And making room means what it means. I already know this is going to "shock" some of you. And I absolutely don't mean everyone should be doing like me, I'm simply saying the way *I* feel & try to proceed. I don't know why, but I want to get organized (or reorganized) this coming year more than ever. With our coming move (some time in July, I suppose), I want to sort ALL of our stuff out, and know what we use & what we don't, what we can give to someone else (who may need or appreciate it - I already started, I gave baby/toddler books to a friend & others to school), what we can live without & what we can't live without. See what I mean ? The Big Declutter, if you prefer. And coupled with The Big Clean & The Big (Re-)Organization, you get ... a whole month of January already planned week by week, for all the rooms of our appartment. I know, I'm crazy, but I think we need it, even though we don't own that much, we always own too much. Less is more, I've already said that, but I plan to make this proverb live in our house.

But before I start this, I have other crafts to finish AND to start (and finish as well !), and recipes to share here, and a tutorial to build as well. OK, better go before time flies away ... as usual !

I hope you had one awesome Christmas Day, just like you had planned. Enjoy this end of December. Lots of love your way xoxox