Oh The Holidays! Part One of Two

In an effort to play catch-up, here are some very brief updates from the McDonald Christmas...

Pre-Holiday Festivities!

We decorated the tree before we went to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving. Camden had a lot of fun putting the ornaments in their own special places. All of my breakable or meaningful ornaments go up to the top, and Camden gets to put on the plastic/non-breakables ones on the bottom of the tree.


Camden had the honors of placing the star on top of the tree again this year.

He may have a little competition with the Little Miss next year though...


We also celebrate the holidays with an Advent calendar. Each day we did a different activity. Some days the activities require a lot of time, and other days we just colored a picture, painted a snowflake, etc. Here are some pics of the activities...

Gingerbread House

We ran out of icing towards the end of this project because of a little boy who liked to swipe his finger alongside the roof, scoop up the icing, and then slyly put it in his mouth. It took a LONG while for him to understand that we couldn't eat it as we were building it.

After we were all done and I took a picture, I gave in and treated him to the gingerbread man who was supposed to be standing alongside the gumdrop sidewalk. The Little Man didn't even flinch when I screeched "Noooo! Don't eat me!" as he put the gingerbread man to his mouth. He took great care in first eating the limbs and then finishing off the head in one bite.

Camden's Pre-School Christmas Program

Caroline and Aaron waiting patiently for the performance to begin!

There's my Little Man being handed his own jingle bells to shake during the song.

Oh, those jingle bells.

His teachers were optimistic (perhaps a little crazy) to give a bunch of two and three year olds jingle bells in such a confined place. In all fairness, the boy next to Camden hit him with the bells first, but Camden retaliated with a vengeance! There were at least five jingle bell battles going on during the song, and the kids only paused long enough to scream "HEY!" after the first verse. I was somewhat mortified, but the video will be used against him at a later date... like on his first date.


Cinnamon Rolls!

To say Merry Christmas to our friends and teachers, we made Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls.

Camden helped roll the dough out and 'sprinkle' a very generous helping of flour on it. He also helped himself to quite a bit of leftover dough afterward.

He delivered these to his teachers on the week before Christmas. (This was conveniently after the jingle bell incident, so a note of apology was included with the rolls.)

Visit with Santa!

We also visited Santa before we left for Oklahoma.
Camden was more fascinated with the candy cane, and that's understandable. He did remind Santa that he wanted an airplane and was sure to stretch out his hands to emphasize a 'flying airplane'. Caroline just stared at both of them like they were crazy.

Two days later, we took off for Oklahoma for a very eventful and WHITE Christmas...