Christmastime

We decorate for Christmas after Thanksgiving dinner each year, so our season is short, but we tend to be so busy, that it isn't such a bad thing.

I saw a cute little video online of someone wrapping their toilet paper, and I wanted to decorate our toilet paper too!  I didn't have the fancy patterned paper that they used in the video, but I liked our little candy cane toilet paper towers. = )

My mom helped me pull a years' worth of mostly thrifted Christmas presents from Sarah's basement, and it was more than I anticipated. = O

These were most of the squishmallows.  We pulled the ones with tags for the girls to gift to their friends for Christmas. The VOA that I bought them from informed me that they were donated by Claire's at the mall, since they weren't selling very well. I also set aside the Halloween ones that accidentally got mixed in with the Christmas bags. 

Billy was invited to his company's Christmas party at a bowling alley, despite only having worked there for a few weeks.  It was nice to meet some of his coworkers!

The set up was really cool, there were lanes in the party room!  And a private buffet/bar area!

Billy and I bowled with his coworkers Wendy and Sarah, and Sarah's significant other, Don.  I won game one, but our second game was cut short, but as Sarah was in the lead, we declared her the winner.

It was a nice evening.

Emily was helping me cook dinner earlier in the week, and I didn't hear her ask about the tomatoes, and she was already halfway through cutting up one of my Roma tomatoes, before I saw what she was doing. =- (  I feel like I was able to recover it for a salad display for my mom's meeting though!

Usually, the day I get the molasses in my Kroger order, Grace is after me to make the gingerbread houses.  This year though, without that prompting, it was Christmas Eve before I made time to make them!

We had a diminished supply of molasses, since we used it for the St. Lucia cakes at Alice's band concert, but the dough held well, it was just not as sweet. had Alice helped me make the dough the night before, so that we wouldn't have to wait for it to solidify in the morning.  Even so, it still took hours to make, because of the wait time between each round for the mold to cool back down.

One the gingerbread was done, and the icing* whipped up, the fun could begin!

Emily went with her bff Abby to see Santa.  Her mom sent me the pictures, and I love all of them!

I feel like this year has been just the right amount of festive!

later days

*Michigan is switching to requiring all eggs sold in grocery stores to be cage free, so the past two grocery orders, they haven't had eggs. = 0  So, we stretched a single batch of icing for two houses, because my egg stash is running low.

edit 12-30-28: added in the gingerbread houses, since we didn't make them Christmas day.