Christmas Trees and Christmas Treats

December is always a very busy month full of anticipation and excitement in the midst of all the holiday cooking, parties and regular activities that must be kept up with. 

We began the month attending an adults only party… safe to say the best and most fun party we’ve attended as a married couple.  Here is a sample of the dessert I made to bring.  I added some Christmas sprinkles to my holiday fudge recipe this year to make it a little more festive looking.  We left a dish of it for the kids to have while we were gone and we brought some to friends afterward.

We decorated the tree and I have lots of kitty decorations but I often found myself with a rather LARGE kitty in the tree as well.  As soon as we put the tree up Sandy knew it was just for her and, in spite of her “age”, being three years old did NOT stop this kittenish behavior. 

Sandy also found a mouse in the tree and even after the tree was well decorated she wouldn’t leave this poor little mouse alone.  Silly!  How does she know?

Sandy was showing her devilish side… the angel on the tree top sat watching it all.

Somehow Sandy stayed on the nice list and still found herself with a gift on Christmas morning.

On to more of the treats.  After the house was decorated we found time and ingredients to make lots and lots of goodies.  Goodies for teachers, goodies for class parties, goodies for friends, goodies for caroling, goodies for Santa, goodies for holiday dinners, and goodies for ourselves.  The scale says that it was too many goodies but it was sure fun for the month.  Nathan helped me roll peanut butter balls one morning.

Then we dipped the peanut butter balls into chocolate to make “buckeyes”.  It’s an Ohio thing and I finally found an easy recipe that is also delicious.  This may be one of the things I like best about Ohio.  I thought about sending some through the mail but in the end decided they might not survive too well. 

A goodie showed up in the mail one day for  me though, all the way from Oregon.  These were so good; a combination of Oreo and Thin Mints rolled into one.  I savored every single one over the course of several weeks (of which I was proud) and didn’t share a single one (of which I am not proud)… but I didn’t eat them in front of anyone else either.  Plus my husband doesn’t like mint chocolate so he wouldn’t have cared anyway.  Finding these beautiful towels and box of cookies in a mailed box of hand-me-downs for my daughter from her Aunt sure made my day.

By the time Christmas rolled around I had a little bit left of a whole lot of baking.  This works as Christmas Eve Dinner’s dessert after we FIRST pull out a few cookies to leave for Santa.  There is more holiday fudge, Candy Bar Cookies, East End Bars in red and green, Butter Cookie Swirls, and Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip Cookies.  I try to have everyone pick one cookie that they really want to make or have made each year.  If possible I try to have them help me make them too but as more of them are in school now and with more homework it is getting harder to have that time with them.

Can you spot the cat in the tree on the left?  Sometimes she’d take a nap up in the branches.  Merry little kitty.

November

November seems like quite some time ago now.  I didn’t finish getting this posted right after Thanksgiving and at this point what’s another couple of days?

These two beautiful autumny Welcome signs came home from school to grace our doors.  Both Kaitlyn and Tristan continue to progress in their German studies.

Nathan helped me to vote in the November elections after we read some books like Duck for President and When I Grow Up I Want to Be President.  We talked about why voting is important and Nathan’s was all the help I needed.

One day we got to pick Lindsay up from school early and we headed to the zoo before picking up the other children.  It was so much fun to just have the two of them, an unlikely pair, to spend time with in this way.

Lindsay performed in The Music Man as a townsperson both singing and dancing during the second weekend in November.  Kaitlyn and I got to go to the Saturday afternoon performance together and see this musical. 

 

Kaitlyn received a “replacement” sweatshirt as a  gift from her Grammy; one that fits and takes the place of the size 2 she’d been insisting on wearing.  Kaitlyn was quite surprised that it fit and happy to still have a similar sweatshirt.

This peanut butter-cheerio loving cat discovered…

Ice Water.  She prefers hers in a glass!!!

We made up so many stories with the little people and their castle.

We spent hours playing and then we’d go right back to the story after an interruption.

I had intended on writing down the reader’s digest version of our stories but at this point it’s been too long.  Some of them were soooooo funny!

I tried a new blueberry poppy seed coffee cake with lemon.  It was quite delicious.

Nathan decided that it was never too cold to go outside for a peachy popsicle.  And Scruffles enjoyed the last of this year’s catnip while Nathan and I blasted off through outer space on our big swing rocket ship in the afternoons.

After receiving a less than stellar mark on his first quarter report card for music class Tristan made sure to fill out and return his practice chart for the Recorder.  Nathan found the second recorder and these two were quite the wakeup crew in the early mornings at our house.  I’m sure the neighbors didn’t realize how glad they should be for window closing season. 

Haley went to her first Homecoming Dance and borrowed my old formal from a dinner dance cruise her Dad and I had back in college on The Spirit of Rochester out on the Lake that May 18 1/2 years ago just before we graduated from college and got married.  Haley wanted something special done with her hair too.  Hair is not my forte but I decided to give it a shot.  I thought about hair all week but still had no idea what I was going to come up with until I was done.  Her hair turned out beautifully.

I think I did a pretty good job.  Haley was pleased as well.

We continued to find notes left on our pillows from a special little someone.  I love little hearts and people and rainbows and letters drawn by young children.  So cute!

Nathan got to help bake when it was his turn to make Family Night treats.  Getting assigned to make treats only happens about once every two months by the time every one gets a turn so he wanted to make SURE we had chocolate chips.  We made a big batch of some really yummy Cowboy Cookies which fit the bill and even had leftovers for a lunchbox treat later in the week.  While we waited for them to bake we got into the puzzles of North American maps.  We named the states as we put them in where they belonged and we worked on who lives in what state.  Washington happened to be the last state to get put in the puzzle.  Somebody important lives there that Nathan sends mail to fairly often these days. 

Scruffles enjoyed the afternoon sun on the cushy chairs out on the deck.

And finally we worked on the great big giant puzzle of the United States.  It seems appropriate as we approached Thanksgiving.  We worked on picking out and naming Ohio, New York and Washington in particular learning and thinking about who lives in those places.  We also named the other states and who or what might be there, as well.  In one of our long loved books by Joan Sweeney called “Me On the Map” we made sure to sing the continent song as well as we pointed to the continents on the map and when we went to the zoo Nathan was able to look at the shape of the continent on the information signs of the different animals and name the continent.  There was a lot of singing through the zoo that day. 

And that is what I remember from November!