Christmas and Hanukkah Prep

We have some busy bees around here getting ready for Christmas and Hanukkah, which starts on December 21st. 

I made the background to this advent calendar last year, then decided I didn't like how it turned out and hid it away in the garage. With a year's perspective it didn't look so horrible so I made the ornaments for it this year, just in time for December 1st. Sylvie is holding up the Max and Penny ornaments, her favorites.

Sylvie and Nora have been using liquid water colors to paint envelopes for some of our holiday cards. (If you do this, make sure you flip up the envelope flap so you don't seal your envelopes shut with watercolors. We learned the hard way.)

For our wrapping paper this year, I bought a big roll of butcher paper and the girls have been experimenting with different techniques to decorate it.

Stamping red and green dot paints for Christmas paper...

And using corks to stamp blue and silver glitter glue for Hanukkah paper...

On Friday, we brought home our Christmas tree.

We decided to hang only non-breakable ornaments on the tree this year. You can probably guess why.

So with our glass ornaments looking festive on the mantel, the tree was a little bare. The girls had a great time making salt dough ornaments to fill it up. The night before I won best cookie* at my friend's Cookie Exchange party and one of my prizes was ornament shaped cookie cutters that were perfect for making our salt dough ornaments.

The cookie cutters have also been perfect for playing with our peppermint-scented glitter play dough. My other prize was some Starbucks hot cocoa mix.

 * My winning cookie recipe was Peppermint Bark Rice Krispie Treats, which were regular Rice Krispie Treats with peppermint extract added to the marshmallow and drizzled with white chocolate and crushed candy cane. I only won by one vote and yes, I was embarrassed to win with a recipe I made in the microwave.