Z is for Zion

We've made it A-Z already, which means it's the eve of Christmas Eve! Today we read "Z is for Zion" in S is for Star: A Christmas Alphabet by Cynthia Furlong Reynolds and "A Dream of Heaven" in The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones. Above is Ella's depiction of the jewels of which the heavenly city is made.

For our big finale, we planned a special advent walk. We were inspired by a drawing in a Tasha Tudor book, in which a Christmas Eve tradition is to take a candle-lit walk into the woods each year where they discover a creche in the forest. Well, we had to settle for our tiny city backyard and a path lit by luminaries leading to a large blow-mold nativity set from Brent's childhood, but it was a beautiful starry night, and it was quite magical all the same. We sang Away in a Manger by Ella's request when we got to the manger.

The girls were really thrilled and insisted on going back to the house and rewalking the path or "marching to the manger" as Ella called it. She would stop and say, "Look Baby Jesus's star. Follow it to Bethlehem."

Then they gave all the different nativity figures big hugs and kisses.

When we finally decided to go back in after our eighth or ninth journey to Bethlehem, Mabel sat down on the porch step and pouted, "I wanna march to Baby Jesus!" Ella requested that we do it all again tomorrow. "And Daddy can we do it just like today and have it be a surprise?"

Thank you for joining us on our advent alphabet journey. We're off for a much-needed vacation and time with our families. I wish you light for your journey, comfort for those who are afraid, and great joy this Christmas season. Blessings on you and your families! Merry Christmas!
 

Y is for You

Y is for God's best gift for You. (That's a self-portrait by Ella.) We read God Made Christmas by Jess Stainbrook and Mark Burr and Thank You God, for Christmas by Henrietta Gambill.

We talked about being thankful to God for all the great things we have in life. This also turned out to be an excellent opportunity to do some talking about present etiquette: saying thank you to people who give you presents, saying nice things about the presents like "I like it," never rude things.

Then we made a paper present, and glued ribbon and paper tags on it. We punched out some paper tags and wrote lots of things we were thankful to God for giving us. As you can see, Ella had lots to be grateful for.

And Mabel a little less so, but dinosaurs did make the list. Later, after dinner, she was dancing around in her angel costume, and said "I have good news about Jesus and Dinosuars go away!" (The girl has a real love/ hate relationship with dinosaurs.)

We also made a little picture from some fun paper we had. We punched out a photo from our Christmas card and glued it on the paper heart.

Second Annual Making of the Gingerbread Houses

The second fun thing we have been expecting to do for a long time is make gingerbread houses. We first made them last year, and had so much fun, we decided it should be an annual family tradition. We use graham crackers as a base. We buy some of our candy at an Amish bulk store we stop at in West Virginia during Thanksgiving. We picked up a few more candies to supplement and I found these fun Wilton Christmas light sprinkles to use this year too.

I didn't get really good photos of the actual process of making them. It could be that our mouths were too full of candy. But here is a little tour of our gingerbread neighborhood.

First stop: Brent's New England colonial house. Please notice the candles in the window, the peppermint roof and the lollipop tree. Lovely.


Next stop: Ella's castle. The fanciest house on the block. She wanted to make more than one house, but we told here to just keep expanding into the yard, which she did wonderfully with gummy lifesavers and Christmas lights.

Then we arrive at: Mabel's Three Little Pigs House. It is the brick house of course. The pigs are kind of tiny, but there's one red one in the yard and two black pigs in the attic. She wanted green Christmas lights of course and lots of bricks.

Finally our last stop: my log cabin in the woods. I like how the stone chimney came out and also the bonfire with marshmallow sticks in the front.

X is for Expect

X is for Expect (best I could do). Boy, was that word feeling appropriate today. After all the walking on our trip, I was really aware that I am 35 weeks pregnant, and feeling every minute of it.

And, of course, being pregnant helped the girls to really get what "expecting" something good to come means. We read, "Anna's story" from The Three Wise Women of Christmas by Dandi Daley Mackall and Who Is Coming to Our House by Joseph Slate. Ella said she is expecting Mamaw and Papaw, expecting baby Zoe, and expecting to have a good Christmas. Mabel said she is expecting dinosaurs.

And, today, we got to do two things we have been excitedly expecting for a long time. I  have been taking a cake decorating class for the past three weeks on Monday nights. The class was a gift for my birthday and I realized that this month was probably my only opportunity to take it for the next year or so. It was a little bit of a hard adjustment for me to be gone during bedtime, but the fact that I always bring home fancy cakes and cupcakes does sweeten the deal considerably.

For the girls belated birthday present, Ella got her own real baking and decorating set from my brother and sister-in-law. She was so excited that she could really use the toys to bake things. So we made up a little cake for her in her pan with my leftover cupcake batter.  Then I taught her to decorate it. We ended up using my leftover pre-filled bags from class instead of her play ones.


Here's her masterpiece. Lovely!


While Ella was decorating her cupcake, Mabel got to decorate a giant gingerbread man cookie that Brent's co-worker bought her. Of course, she chose the greenie frosting. It turns out she's quite a whiz with a cake decorating bag too.

Her finished cookie...

And Ella's second masterpiece, her giant cookie.

W is for Wise Men

W is for Wise Men. We got a little sidetracked by a fun trip to a Swedish superstore today. We tried to sell the girls on it as a journey just like the wise men took, but I'm not sure they believed us. I was off at my cake decorating class in the evening so Brent led the advent time. They read "Wise Men and a Star" in My Very First Christmas by Lois Rock.

Then they wrapped up and decorated a present the girls had picked out for me. There has been much talk of a secret (and by that I mean not so secret) present for Mommy. I have surmised that it is probably made of candy and is either a guinea pig or a skunk. The rest of the time I pretend not to listen when they talk about what the present really is.



Ella has really gotten into wanting to buy gifts for the rest of the family. A few days ago, she told me, "Mommy, let's go Christmas shopping tomorrow." I said, "But we've already bought all our presents for everyone." She replied, "But I want to buy something for Mabel. Her heart really loves Tinkerbell and I want to get her something Tinker Bell."

So on Sunday, we took her to the craft store where they have lots of $1 stocking stuffers that are Tinker Bell. She picked out a Tinker Bell kaliedoscope for Mabel. Brent and Ella wrapped it up, and, of course, Ella likes to whisper, "We wrapped up Mabel's Tinker Bell thing" right in front of Mabel. Fortunately Mabel is only two and doesn't think much of it.

When we went to IKEA, she was determined to pick out a special present for Daddy, and would then "whisper," in the car while we're driving, "Mommy, don't tell Daddy about the candle thing."

The girls also helped Brent fill several gift baskets of homemade gifts we had made. Afterward, she came into the living room carrying a giant stack of baskets and proceeded to put each of my presents under the tree in its own individual basket. Gift baskets, you see!

V is for Virgin Mary

Today we learned about the Virgin Mary. We read "Mary's Story" in The Three Wise Women of Christmas by Dandi Daley Mackall.

Then, since we were going to be doing advent worship later in the day with some friends, we went on a little trip to buy some ingredients to make Latvian piragi. Somehow on our trip to buy yeast and bacon at various Polish bakeries and delis, we came home with a full Polish lunch including a Christmas Kielbasa (quickly redubbed "The giant Christmas hotdog" so the kids would eat it), Polish dill pickles, and chrusciki, which are translated as Polish angel wings cookies. It turns out, they were not nearly as good as the ones Brent's Polish grandmother, Babci, made at Christmas each year, but it was very fun.


If you are unfamiliar with Polish Christmas dishes as I was before I married into the culture, here's a helpful video starring The Veggie Tales: "The Eight Polish Dishes of Christmas."

Of course, I tried to somehow relate this to the Virgin Mary, but Brent said not to worry about it, the Poles love the Virgin Mary.

U is for Unto Us a Child is Born

 

As we entered the last week before Christmas and the beginning of vacation for Brent, I decided not to plan specific craft projects to go along with most of the project. That way we would have room to do all the fun Christmas preparation we like to do.

We talked more about the prophets today and read Isaiah 9: 6
⁶ For unto us a Child is born,
      Unto us a Son is given;
      And the government will be upon His shoulder.
      And His name will be called
      Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
      Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

We read the The Something Wonderful: A Christmas Story by Karen Hill, and listened to the song "For Unto Us a Child is Born" performed by the Veggie Tales (You can get a free mp3 from Amazon, just click on the link.)

T is for Tree

Today was T for tree. We read The Tale of Three Trees retold by Angela Elwell Hunt and A Merry Bunny Christmas (a Max and Ruby book).

Then we made some Christmas tree nature collages. We had a lot of greens leftover from the wreath Brent made. I clipped them into small pieces. I taped down a piece of contact paper for each girl, sticky-side up. They stuck their branches on the paper, then added silver rick-rack and sequins.



Then we put a piece of contact paper on top, sticky-side down to sandwich it all together. I like to think of them as Christmas tree: Deconstructed.

by Ella

by Mabel

We had popcorn for a snack and a special Christmas tree lunch: Cheese quesadillas and green peppers cut out with cookie cutters, plus carrot and cranberry ornaments.


Then we had hot cocoa with Christmas tree marshmallows.

S is for Sheep and Shepherds

We read The Shepherd's Story by Halcyon Backhouse and Ten Christmas Sheep by Nancy White Carlstrom. We made fluffy sheep art.


by Ella

by Mabel

Ever since we made the angel treats, Ella has been begging for a shepherd treat too. So this is what we came up with. Peanut Butter cracker shepherd and sheep.

R is for Room

 
We read Room for a Little One by Martin Waddell and Jason Cockcroft.  And, yes, another homemade play dough project. This time I made gingerbread play dough.

Gingerbread Play Dough Recipe
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup water
1/2 cup salt
2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. all-spice
1-2 Tbs cocoa

Place all ingredients (except cocoa) in a saucepan and stir. Add cocoa until the dough is your desired shade of brown. (You might want to add another tablespoon water if you add a lot of cocoa.) Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until the dough forms a ball. Take it out of the pan and let cool on wax paper until cool enough to touch. Knead a few times until it feels like play dough.

We rolled out the dough and cut out little houses with my new cookie cutter, and stamped them with some play dough stamps.


Then we got our our Play Doh ice cream maker, which has tons of tiny molds to make all kinds of candies with which to decorate our houses.

 And Ella also made a gingerbread frog.

Q is for Quiet

Boy, I was really struggling to come up with something for Q, but finally settled on Quiet. There's a reason it's so many points in Scrabble. We read a picture book called Silent Night, with the words from the song. But I still needed a project. Then, I stumbled upon an idea this morning to make a Christmas memory game and remembered that I still had a couple pages of nativity stickers. Eureka!

The game was a huge hit with Ella. She pretty much played it all day, declaring that she was really good at it. She said that she was going to take it to bed with her so she could wake up in the morning and play it again, but I think it, fortunately, stayed downstairs.

Here's how I made it:
I found this handy-dandy ring of index cards a friend had given the girls, but you could use any kind of small index cards or card stock.
We punched out some pretty paper tags with my giant tag-punch and glued them on the black cards to decorate the fronts (and to give Ella something to keep her busy for awhile), but it was not really a necessary step.


Then we took two sheets of matching stickers, and put them on the back of the cards. Ours had all the different characters of the nativity. (It occurs to me, though, that you could take stickers of any of your kids' favorite characters as long as you had two sheets.)


And there you go, a simple memory game. Flip over all the cards and find a match!

P is for Promise

For P day, we went back to the time of the prophets and learned about God's promise to his people. We read "Get Ready" in The Jesus Storybook Bible. Of course, Mabel decided that we also needed to read "The Three Little Pigs."

Then we got out our peppermint playdough again. This time we used it with some nativity candy molds that I got for my birthday.It worked really well, with a little assistance in getting them out.



Here's what Ella and I made while Mabel worked on her brick house for her pigs.


The best part of the day, though, was my own little Christmas miracle. The girls had remarkably good behavior all day. Then I got to go off to my cake decorating class while Brent did bedtime, and bedtime went better than it had ever gone. Then they both slept over 12 hours by themselves! Wow! Not even the fact that our car wouldn't start in the morning and our dryer died could really tarnish that.

O is for Ornament

O is for ornament and also a million Christmas carols that start with "Oh." So we had some advent worship time to Oh Come All ye Faithful and Oh Holy Night and other non-"Oh" favorites. Then the girls watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" while we mixed up the dough for some Cinnamon-scented ornaments to give as gifts. The recipe, or my interpretation of it, was a little bit off, but we did finally end up with these. We had some fun with our vintage Sesame Street cookie cutters.

We interrupt this advent for some artwork

 
I had to share these two recent drawings from Ella. Above is a portrait of Mom and Dad and Baby Zoe. It's really too bad she drew this one day after we got our Christmas cards printed because what a great portrait. I'm the one on the left if you are wondering. Brent is in the middle. I think she really captured the inner me because that is certainly how I feel like I look most days.


Also this drawing, which comes with a story. "This is you, Mom, carrying baby Zoe. You're walking in the woods and you meet a misgusting creature. It's a skunk!" The misgusting creature is at the bottom of the picture by my foot.

N is for Nativity

Today we read Christmas in the Manger by Nola Buck and Felicia Bond. and "The Special Baby" from The Rhyme Bible Storybook.

I thought today was going to work out really well. It was N for Nativity and there just happened to be a Live Nativity at a local church in the evening. Perfect for a Saturday field trip. Well, when we got to the church, the stable was empty except for a miniature donkey and two tiny goats. But we do love miniature donkeys and goats. At the end of the day, Mabel said she loved "learning about dotes."