Last year we started a few new traditions - cut our own Christmas tree, activity based advent calendar and I am sure a few others. This year we continued the advent calendar and for the most part successfully completed an activity a day.
December 1: Cut a Christmas Tree
December 2: Decorate the Christmas Tree
December 3: Write a letter to Santa Claus. Ellie wrote hers with help from Daddy. Ryan actually communicated some of these things to Jared and Ellie as they peppered him with questions. Ellie asked for a Lambie (lamb from a cartoon Doc McStuffins) and a potty for her babies. Ryan asked for candy. He's in his "no" phase now, so it took some thoughtful questioning to get him to say yes to anything, but he was pretty excited about candy.
December 4: Decorate Pinecones - Daddy was on duty since I was out of town - there was one giant mess, but they are cute!
December 5: Ellie had her Christmas program/concert for daycare.
December 6: Christmas Sticker Activity - used more stickers that Nana brought last year!
December 7: We cheated and used Carter's Birthday party as part of the calendar! Too hard to travel and do activities that don't already go together.
December 8: Make a snowman - pretty hard to do when there is no snow, unless you do this!
December 9: Make a Christmas Tree - we cut strips of colored paper and glued them to a blank page in the shape of a tree with a star at the top
December 10: Make a snowflake - we used the Borax recipe with pipe cleaners. What a beautie!
December 11: Watch Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
December 12: Make a snow globe - this was fun, but wasn't as successful as I had hoped. Our tree left debris in the water and the glitter wasn't fine enough to float gently down to the bottom. But the good news is I have enough glycerin to do this next year and probably several more years.
December 13: No formal activity - at least that I can remember!
December 14: Have a Christmas Party - this year we held an ugly sweater party for all of our friends. We served up a nice ham dinner with twice baked potatoes and pumpkin pie. Everyone brought a side dish. We even had yummy festive drinks like cranberry martinis and spiked eggnog. It was super cute that our friends the Simmons kids had very similar sweaters to Ellie and Ryan.
December 15: Make Christmas Cookies - we kept it simple and did one kind of cookie this year. Sugar cookies with sprinkles some cut out and some circle cut from a log.
December 16: Watch a Christmas video - Ellie and Ryan were both pretty sick this week and spent most of it at home instead of at school. We watched a random Christmas movie that was free on Amazon Prime.
December 17: Make a gingerbread house. Our friends Joel and Cailin gave us a cute gingerbread village of small houses which was perfect. There was one for each of us to decorate. Initially Ryan was good about putting candy on the house and not eating, but quickly that changed. 2-3 for the house and 1 for Ryan and by the end it was 1 for the house and 1 for Ryan and even taking candy off the house to eat.
December 18: Make chocolate covered pretzels.
December 19: Wrap gifts. Ellie loves to wrap the presents for her cousins, grandparents and uncles/aunts. Ryan was helpful too handing us tape and scissors.
December 20: No formal activity - mom and dad were pooped after such a long week.
December 21: Look at Christmas lights - Nana came up from Moses Lake to drive around with us.
December 22: Ellie got to go to Moses Lake with Daddy. Jared played ice hockey on the lake with his buddies for 4 hours and Ellie got to hang out with her cousins all day!
December 23: Travel to Moses Lake
December 24: Christmas eve with the Haight family.
December 25: Christmas day with the Fisher family
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