Christmas Present

In the past, we have celebrated Christmas in our extended family by slaving for days over an extremely gluttonous meal followed by hours of cleanup and topping off with a week of leftovers. This year we did things differently! My cousin brought her kids over early and we made Christmas cookies. (This part would have gone better had my oven been working, but we managed by taking the cookies to church and baking them there.). After we got back from church with the cookies, we found that my husband had a nice big batch of icing already made up, so we colored it different colors and let the kids go to town on icing the cookies. Our batch wasn't very big, but each of the kids got 7-8 cookies to ice so I think it went pretty well. Some of them were mountainous globs of icing with many sprinkles and M&Ms on top while others were truly labored over works of art. I'm speaking here to the difference between the baby (4) and the boy (6- almost 7), the boy went with the bigger is better theory

while the baby was very meticulous about making designs on his cookies.

As the kids finished up their decorating, the other guests began to arrive including one very special guest who was in charge of bringing the pizza. We sat around all evening talking, laughing eating pizza and drinking Lutheran beverages until it was deemed time to get the children to bed (as some schools don't get out until halfway through Thursday, so some children had to get up for school today). I think this was one of the most fun Christmas celebrations that our family has had since the celebrations were held at Grandma's. I hope we have made a new tradition for the Christmases yet to come.