Gingerbread Houses

The last few nights the girls worked on their gingerbread houses. It is interesting trying to fit in Christmas traditions with homework. That is why they took 3 nights to complete. Here they are!

Hannah's house

Abigail's house...she wants me to point out her peppermint "gifts" under the tree! She made them all by herself :)

O Christmas Tree

Each year we try to put up the tree on the weekend after Thanksgiving. We used to get a real tree...since they are so beautiful in Washington, and I swore I would never have a fake one. But....the first Christmas we moved to Arizona, I realized how expensive and not so pretty the real trees are here, compared to the northwest, and so I broke down and just went to Costco and bought their fabulous pre-lit tree. The lights used to take me about 4 hours, just by themselves (so the tree got decorated over the course of 2 nights), but now I don't have to deal with that...yeah!!!

This year we got so involved with decorating I forgot to take pictures of us all doing it. The girls can now hang most of the ornaments themselves, and David just reaches the high-up places, and I put on the ribbon and large pieces first. It is so fun to open the boxes and take out all the "treasures"... the girls ooh and aah each year and they both keep saying, "these ornaments are my favorite!!"....then we open another box, and then they say, "no...these are my favorite!!!", and so on. :) Then when we are done we sit on the couch, enjoy eggnog, listen to Christmas music and admire the tree that we have just decorated.

I love themed trees, so I still have my very ornate Christmas tree...OK... no one get on my case- my children still decorate it and they love it. The trick is to have so many ornaments that it really doesn't matter where they put them! :)

This year as we sat and relaxed enjoying the tree, the girls wanted us to tell stories of our trees growing up. So David shared about the garland they used to have that spiraled around the tree, and about the multi-colored large bulb lights. I shared about Gamie and Papa's tinsel covered "rocket ship" tree..."What is tinsel?" Hannah wanted to know. "Something you never want to put on a tree!", I told her :)

I told them about the year that my family went and cut down a tree in the forest and it was so ugly that it had to be flocked to death, and then it had spiders .... which ended up all over our house. I think this is the reason I have no desire to go chop down Christmas trees out in the woods!

And then the best story of my Persian cat who ate the Christmas tree skirt (those white fluffy "snow" ones) and then threw it up all over the house... lovely...

It is fun to tell our kids stories of our childhood, and they never tire of hearing them :)