Going way back again… as part of our Christmas celebrations I did a number of projects over the month of December while inviting friends over to join us. I wanted to make sure the holiday season was about more than just a big pile of presents but about sharing and making memories with friends. We did cinnamon ornaments (note to self: use glue), string balls (note to self fill water balloons with water), gingerbread houses (note to self: awesome job using milk cartons!), and a mommy gift of hand scrub.

The cinnamon ornaments burned Josie’s hands and rather fell apart. So I think next year we need to use rolling pins and add glue to the mixture of applesauce and cinnamon, or maybe just skip them all together. They sure made the house smell good.

The string balls proved to be a little difficult for the kids. (Basically you dip thin string in glue watered down and wrap it around a balloon and pop the balloon after it dries. Viola, string ball) But Josie enjoyed making them and we had a good party. Next year not only will I get water balloons, but I will fill them with water, not air, so they are actually round. They were more pears shaped. They are pretty though and Josie liked hanging them up and pointing them out. Maybe next year she’ll be able to do it more herself.

And our final project was the classic gingerbread houses. I wasn’t going to buy a bunch of kits at $20 a pop so I made my own gingerbread and royal icing and bought the candies to go on top. This was a project the kids really jumped into. We used small milk or cream containers to be the basic structure so it would stand up to preschooler-applied-candy-pressure, this was KEY. Then they squeezed and decorated to their hearts content. Celia loved it too, although I had to keep pulling candy out of her mouth. She’d put it on the house and then take it off and lick it. Josie had a particular favorite candy as I’m sure you can see from her house. Chrissie and Charlotte joined us for construction. I had to guilt Chrissie into coming over after all the work making the gingerbread, because it turns out she was in the early weeks of pregnancy and super sick, so I feel bad now, but I think they had some fun.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 at 8:20 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.