Our Christmas Card

For the last of our Christmas posts, here is our Christmas card from 2012. We took these photos in Jessica's backyard over Thanksgiving. I love how Christine's ear warmer is not covering her ears! oops. Here's a few outtakes.

Crafting for Christmas

Christine has been a glittering pro since she was one (evidence here) but I think her skills have improved some. Here we are painting modge podge onto cardboard stars that we cut out from cereal boxes and folded to be 3D, then covered in silver glitter. Afterwards Christine picked out ribbon that we glued on to make them into pretty present toppers. Christine LOVED it and wanted to keep glittering forever! I spent a bit of time on pinterest in December (ok I always spend a lot of time on pinterest) collecting ideas for Christmas crafts and activities for me and Christine to do together (okay and Daddy too!) We pulled out the water colors and colored pictures with Christine's oil pastels and cut out all sorts of shapes from paper. I am a bit biased, but I think Christine is very talented with the paintbrush. Her favorite technique was to mix black with all the other water colors but instead of becoming a mess, the colors always looked more saturated. Her best piece was a landscape painting of gigi's pool. It's not the Adirondacks, but it's all she knows. 

The best pinterest find though was a nativity memory game that we printed out and laminated. Christine loves matching games and is exceptionally good at them (I don't even have to try to let her win, she wins even if I am trying to beat her!)  We played it for endless hours. Good thing Santa Claus brought us an Elmo memory game or we would still be playing our Christmas version.

Setting up our Christmas Tree

Okay, I probably should hurry and finish posting my Christmas pictures before the end of January!

Usually we put up our tree immediately after Thanksgiving, but Jeff had another residency interview to go to so we had to wait to put our Christmas tree up until December 2nd.

We are still using our little 4 foot Christmas tree we bought at an after Christmas 90% off sale when we were engaged. It has been a good little tree and perfect for our tiny apartment. But we are soooo excited to get a real tree next year.

Christine was a good helper and enjoyed putting the ornaments on their hooks.

Good thing I took this picture when I did, because the lower half of the lights on the tree died a couple days later. All the more reason to get a full size tree next year!

Christmas Preparations Part Two: Books

Last year we started a new tradition of wrapping up our Christmas books and opening one each night before Christmas. It's a great tradition and one we plan to continue for a long time. Christine loved unwrapping a present every night, and I loved getting to read every single Christmas book with Christine.

Favorite memories:

• Amelia Bedelia's Christmas- we bought this book because it was super cheap (we love shopping at Half Price Books- our used book store) and because Jeff and I loved Amelia Bedelia as kids, but we thought it might be too old for Christine this year and she wouldn't like it. Boy were we wrong. There is a joke at the very beginning of the book that Christine couldn't get enough of: Mrs. Rodgers tells Amelia Bedelia that "Christmas is just around the corner" and Amelia Bedelia responds "What corner?" Then Mrs. Rodgers explains, no no it's an expression that means it's coming soon.  We would get a few pages into the book and Christine would turn back the pages to the beginning "no no Mommy read that page!" so she could hear the joke again.... and again, and again!
• Dora's Starry Christmas- how could we resist buying a Dora Christmas book for our huge Dora fan? (A little background: Santa's reindeer get  sick so Diego has to nurse them back to health and Dora helps Santa deliver the presents while her explorer stars pull the sleigh) Christine's favorite is the page where they are delivering presents in the jungle and it's too dark to see and then... (imagine a LOUD toddler voice excitedly saying this:) "OH! OH! GLOWY STAR DO IT! GLOWY STAR DO IT!"
• Twas the Night Before Christmas- This was another of those books we bought thinking it would be too old for Christine this year, but maybe she would like the pictures (it's illustrated by Mary Engelbreit). Christine shocked us by memorizing almost the entire the book (it was a potty time favorite). What?! Does she even know what sugar plums are? or kerchief? or even creature? We pulled out the video camera and recorded her reciting the poem as proof because we figured no one would believe us that Christine can say "Twas night before Christmas, all through house, not a creature stirring not even a mouse" all the way through "Merry Christmas all, all GOOOOD night!"
• I Spy Christmas- definitely the most used Christmas book, though not for reading. Because of it's large, hard-backed size it made the perfect book to put her Dora puzzles together on top of.

Christmas Preparations part 1: Cookies

This year for Christmas we stayed here in Texas.  Surprise, surprise, it was not a white Christmas. The actual temperature on Christmas day- 70 degrees.

We had a lot of fun preparing for Christmas because Christine was finally old enough to understand what was going on. Here's the Christmas traditions we started/continued this year.

1. Christmas Cookies!  When I spent my first Christmas with Angela's family, she told me that they made great food and had lots of cookies.  In my family "lots of cookies" means a couple dozen.  In Salas lingo, "lots of cookies" means enough cookies to cover all non-cooking surfaces in the house. It is amazing.  Unfortunately with only 3 mouths to eat our cookies, we had to limit our batches and then give a bunch away. 

Christine loved helping to make the cookies.  Her favorite and most requested was "gingerbread men" cookies from sugar cookie dough. Here she is stamping out one now.

For all the Hamakers out there reading this, you might be thinking, "Jeff, you went along with all that cooking?!"  Not too worry, like all Hamaker traditions, I turned it into a competition, thereby superseding the "no cooking" rule.  The results of the competition:

• First place: Gingerbread Softies dipped in chocolate- rated best by both the competitors and non-competitors  (recipe from Dana Made It HERE and chocolate dipped version HERE)
• Second place: Raspberry Jam Strips- Gigi's favorite (a classic Salas recipe)
• Third place: Holiday Confetti Cake Batter Cookies- so easy to make since they are made using a box of cake mix (a huge plus when cooking with Christine) and they tasted like delicious cupcakes! seriously the best cake mix cookies I've ever had (recipe from Sally's Baking Addiction HERE)
• Fourth place: Peppermint Brownies- Chocolate chip brownies with a layer of peppermint icing covered in a chocolate ganache and sprinkled with candy canes. Delicious, but so chocolate-y rich that it's hard to eat more than one so a lot went un-eaten (Recipe from Budget Gourmet Mom HERE and adapted using THIS similar recipe from Our Best Bites)
• Fifth Sugar Cookies, another classic Salas family recipe (they were great sugar cookies and fun to make, but they lacked chocolate)
• Sixth place: Fudge- usually Angela's favorite, but we made the recipe from old marshmallow cream (okay it had already expired... but Jeff said "can marshmallow cream ever go bad? I mean it's just sugar" answer: yes, yes it can!) It tasted wonderful, it just didn't set up right. Don't worry the fudge wasn't distributed to our friends and neighbors. (Angela is trying to convince me that she needs to make more fudge to make up for our failed fudge because she didn't get her "fudge fix"...something about the baby needing fudge to grow healthy and strong...)
• Last place: Slow Cooker Cinnamon Almonds- we imagined that this recipe would make our house smell delicious while cooking (they did not) and that they would taste like those yummy almonds you can buy in the mall or at events like baseball games (they did NOT). We had our expectations pretty high and were sorely disappointed with this recipe. They weren't terrible or anything, just okay. (recipe from The Recipe Critic) The reason why the fudge beat out the Almonds is because we ate up every piece of fudge and there is still a bowl of these almonds sitting on our kitchen counter right now.