Gingerbread House Year 4; the biggest and best yet!

This has become my favorite Christmas tradition with my kids; decorating gingerbread houses. In years past we've glued together graham crackers and decorated small houses.  

But this year I decided we needed to get a bit more sophisticated and challenge ourselves a bit. 

I found some large cardboard and hot glued a house together real quick, the chimney is out of proportion but it worked. 

Then I pulled out leftover Halloween candy from the refrigerator and Christmas candy from a parade we went to a couple weeks ago. We had a LOT more candy than I thought, surely more than enough. 

The boys decided they needed to separate the candy by colors and then they went at it! 

While the boys worked on the house, Yahoo and I decorated ice cream cones to look like trees. 

Surprisingly, a very small amount of candy was eaten!

The only candy I ended up buying for this project was licorice for the chimney. 

One hour later our house was done!! 

And there wasn't ONE piece of candy left in the house....they used it all!! 

LOL...they even used some Halloween suckers with bony hands! 

See the one sticking out of the chimney? Yip says that it's Santa's hand after he fell in the fireplace fire. 

During our "creative" building process Yip suggested that next year we make a skyscraper gingerbread house! How cool would that be?? I've been envisioning what this yearly tradition might grow into the older my kids get. Might we start making an entire village? Will we have to invest a large chunk of our Christmas budget into candy for decorating? Will our gingerbread houses morph into entire room installations? The possibilities are endless!!! 

What do you need to get in the Christmas spirit?

Because of our window project  I don't have our Christmas tree up yet. This is by far the latest I've ever gone without a tree of some sort. Though I've found that I don't miss it. I've heard that a lot of people aren't in the Christmas spirit this year because it's so warm but I haven't had that problem. I'm DEFINITELY in the Christmas spirit. 

I have my Nativity set up in the living room (far from my window) and I have Alabama, Oak Ridge Boys and  Alan Jackson singing Christmas sings to me everyday from Pandora. That's all I need to be festive. 

So, quick question....what is the one Christmas "thing" you need to be in the Christmas spirit??

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Today was our church's Children's Christmas Program. I must say, of all the churches I've ever attended THIS is the way to do a Christmas Pageant. 

Rather than trying to get a group of squirrely kids to memorize lines and perform a Christmas play our church  actually gets the Christmas program all finished by October. While the weather is still nice a few months ago we gathered all the kids together after school and took photos of them dressed up in various roles of the Christmas story. Then it gets put on a Power Point presentation and the kids get to sit next to Mom and Dad and watch themselves in the "pageant". 

I'm sharing just a few of the photos the photographer (that would be me) took. By no means am I a professional but it was sure a lot of fun! 

The innkeeper turning away Mary and Joseph. 

I just love Mary's green fingernail polish...too cute! 

The choir of angels announcing the birth to the shepherds. 

We even have a very nice sheep farmer in the area that let me hang around taking photos of his critters for our pageant. 

This year we even had a "real" Baby Jesus. Bless that mother for trusting me to thrust her little one into the hands of a bunch of 6 and 8 year olds. 

But they sure did love him. 

Our "Wise Men".

Funny side story; my maiden name is Wise and I have three brothers. One of our ministers growing up would always get a kick out of saying, "Here come the Three Wise Men" when my brothers walked in the door. I guess that makes Yip and Yap up there half a wise man :) 

Yap

Yahoo 

Yip

Our little church has had such blessings this year. We started a children's Sunday School class (which I get to teach) in the spring and the first Sunday we only had 3 children. This morning we had 12 get up to sing and share poems in front of the church. What a blessing it's been to work with all these kids. It keeps me busier, along with a few more obligations I've added this year, and I have had as much time to blog as I'd like but that's okay. I get to see all those smiling faces on Sunday mornings! 

One gentleman at our church gave me the best compliment though. He said, "Next week I'll turn 85 years old and I've attended this church since I was 15 years old. I have never seen as many kids in the church as I did today." What a wonderful blessing! It's statements like that which give me hope for the future generations. 

Remodel the Old or Start from Scratch??

It was supposed to be easy...oh, so easy. 

Just replace a window. A couple days tops. 

I just wanted to get rid of this old five pane unopenable (is that a word) windows. 

But we have an old house....bwaa haa haa HAA!! 

I can feel my house laughing at me. 

When the contractor took out my window he founds lots of water damaged rotten boards.

So, he had to take out the wall under my window. 

He'll have to rebuild the wall, not to mention doing something with the stucco on the outside of the house. 

Last night this was what I was looking at right before bedtime. I never realized how much LIGHT came in that east facing window, even at night time. 

Clark the contractor came back today to get to work when he realized that the new window is perfectly square, of course, and that the hole is not, of course. So he now has the problem of making a straight window fit in a crooked hole. 

This is my most recent window. I'm not any closer than last night. 

Oi. 

When I talked to DR about this earlier he proclaimed, "I'm never doing this again!! I'm never remodeling anything else!" 

"So...you'd rather build from scratch?" I asked. Fat chance of that. We never stay in one spot long enough to build a house. He did admit that he wouldn't want to make all the design decisions about a house. Fine by me!!! 

Building a house is a huge financial and time commitment while living in a house during remodeling isn't much fun (noise, dust, unexpected bumps in the road).

So I gotta ask, would you rather....

.....remodel the old house

....or start from scratch and build new? 

The Lasso Lesson

I grew up in a family that made rope. We definitely have more rope than the average family but our rope isn't cowboy rope. Mountain Man passed through a few weeks ago with his heavy duty cowboy lasso and was giving my boys lessons. 

Uncles really are awesome. 

God Bless Mountain Man! He even left us one of his worn out lassos. 

Though I don't know if that's such a wise idea....the boys are enjoying tying one another up and then walking away and seeing if they can get loose. 

My Holiday Table

The week before Thanksgiving our town library hosted a holiday table event. I honestly don't think of myself as the decorating type. Crafty yes, but I'll never have the house that would fit into "Good Housekeeping" like some of my friends. I have never had a really nice set of china or anything. However, I did sign up for a holiday table to share in my old/new china. 

My Grandma L died a few years ago and as my cousins and I were growing up she'd always say, "When I die you're getting this set of dishes!" and she'd be pointing to one place setting in her china cabinet. So I always thought I was getting ONE place setting. Heck, she had to have had a dozen different china patterns in that cabinet, how on earth could she have full sets for all of us? 

Fast forward to September when the kids and I met my parents and some siblings in Oklahoma for a wedding. My mom told me she was bringing Grandma's china. I fully expected a small box, one place setting remember? NOPE! I have 12 place settings, gravy boat, butter dish and 5 different serving dishes and other stuff that I can't remember right now. Dang....that was a surprise! 

For the table I made burlap placemats and had DR cut some wood for coasters. If you look at the jelly jars they are full of white beans with a tea light on top. 

My table wasn't fancy but definitely the most rustic on display but burlap and denim reflects my personality I think. 

All the other tables were MUCH fancier than mine. 

Pink Depression glass...WOW, I don't even want to imagine how much this table is worth! 

Do you remember the AVON dishes? I remember my mom had a goblet in this pattern when I was growing up and I thought it was just so elegant! 

Isn't this table fabulous? I'd almost be afraid to mess up the symmetry by eating at it. 

My boys especially love our "fancy" dishes. I want to let you all know that just because we have fancy dishes they don't just sit in the cabinet collecting dust. We use them for special occasions; Thanksgiving, a day off school, sometimes on Sundays, Fridays too (if the boys did well on their spelling tests!) In fact the boys have been pretty creative when coming up with a special reason to use our fancy plates, how can I say no?