My Favorite Christmas Tradition

So you might think that opening presents, or making baked goods would be my favorite Christmas activity. However, you would be wrong. My absolute favorite thing to do at Christmas is to build gingerbread houses. I'm not so fancy as to use real gingerbread, oh no, I go ghetto all the way and use pure graham cracker goodness. I think it makes it much more of a challenge so that when you make a true masterpiece you can say, "And yeah, I made it all with graham crackers." And since the more people you have creating candy piles the better, we invited our friends Tonia and Andre over.

We had soooo much candy:

Everyone was intently crafting away:

And of course eating candy all the way too:


After much graham cracker crumbling, frosting sliding, and house collapsing we all ended up with some fabulous creations. Even Ella got in on the action, so first off is Ella's, um, thing:

She did most of it by herself.

Anton made a post hurricane Florida beach house:

It was held up with pretzel stick stilts, but they just weren't doing their job so the base got boarded up.

Tonia went the festive direction with Santa's Workshop/Country Church:

Andre went all the way and broke out the big guns:

See before you, Hogwart's Castle! Isn't that fantastic?

Now for the piece de resistance. For many years I have been making some sort of house other than the typical everyday gingerbread house. I've made lighthouses, tree houses, White Houses, doll houses and more. This year I made this:

The tepee. Complete with Native American and horse:

Crackling fire and traditional pottery:

And the day's kill hanging out to dry:

This was so much fun!

And since we were having so much fun we decided to cheat and open some Christmas presents early. But not too many, just the ones we gave to each other.

We made Andre and Tonia open theirs first. I love the reaction we got!

Here's what we gave them:

I was sneaky sneak last week while I was babysitting their kids and took some pictures of them then had them printed and framed it. I wanted to keep it myself it turned out so cute!

Then we dug into our gift from them. Ella did the ripping honors:

And we got:

The Cities and Knights expansion pack for Settlers of Catan! Hooray! You hear that Emily and John? I hearby challenge you to a match when you get back!

So after much sugar ingesting and some great gift giving we called it a night. And what a fabulous night it was too!

My Favorite Christmas Cookies

Of all the cookies my mom ever made while I was growing up, the mint filled chocolate cookie has to be my favorite. They were only made at Christmas, because quite honestly they are a pain to make. But once a year it's worth it to pull out all the equipment and just go for it. The recipe came from my Great-Grandmother, and not to let the heritage recipe die, I of course have to make them every year too.

There is a very essential piece of equipment that I own solely for making these cookies, and that is the cookie press:

I asked for one for Christmas a few years ago as visions of these cookies danced in my head. It's quite the contraption, but without it I could never end up with cookies that look as good as this:

Now these cookies are quite good all by themselves, but what sets them apart from your average boring chocolate Christmas cookie is this:

The mint frosting. You take a big dollop of this stuff and slap it between two of the cookies, and voila! You have the perfect Christmas cookie.

Don't they look divine? They actually get better the longer they sit because the frosting hardens up while the cookies soften up and you get the perfect soft, chocolaty, minty cookie combo that makes you eat far more than is truly healthy for any one person. And these cookies can be deceptive. Since there are two sandwiched together you feel like you are really only eating one cookie for every two you actually eat. That gets dangerous. We had to hide these to make sure we had some to give away.

Now since I know you are all craving these delectable delights I have condescended to share my recipe with you. Aren't you pleased? Here it is:

Mint Filled Chocolate Cookies
3 squares unsweetened baking chocolate 2 cups flour
½ cup butter 2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar ½ tsp salt
1 egg ¼ cup milk

Melt chocolate. Cream together butter and sugar. Add chocolate, then egg. Add dry ingredients alternately with milk. Roll out dough and cut out with cookie cutters or use a cookie press. Bake at 400ºF for 8 minutes. When cool sandwich two cookies together with mint frosting between.

Mint Frosting:
2 T butter, melted 3 cups powdered sugar
½ tsp vanilla 1/8 tsp mint extract
4-5+ tsp milk

Blend melted butter and powdered sugar in a bowl. Add vanilla, mint and milk and mix until of spreading consistency, adding more milk as needed. May tint frosting with green food coloring.

Make these. You won't be disappointed.

And not to leave the rest of my second favorite Christmas confections unrepresented, here is a sampling of the others.

Mmmm. Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. Soft, chewy, with crunchy chips. Sooo good.

The Magic Cookie, aka Almost Candy Bars. Everything sinful about dessert wrapped up into one neat little yummy package.

The butter toffee. Butter, sugar and chocolate. How can you go wrong?

And last, but not least, the sugar cookie. We don't normally make these, but I thought Ella might have fun decorating them. I was right.

She liked to make very large piles of frosting in one place on every cookie she decorated.

Takes after me I guess.

So now that I have you all salivating and craving cookie goodness, go forth and bake yourself some Christmas goodies before it's too late!

Christmas Photo Shoot

So just to rub in the fact that we don't have any snow or cold weather down here, we decided to take our Christmas photos on the beach. And because we are too cheap to hire a photographer and none of our friends were available to drag to the beach we figured we would do it ourselves. As long as you've got a tripod and a timer no problem right? Well our first attempt didn't work out so well:

"Come on guys, hold hands. Look at the camera! Hurry up the camera is going to go off!"

After a couple more not so hot photos we actually managed to score a pretty good one.

Can you believe that everyone is actually looking at the camera at the same time?!? Alex isn't smiling but I'll take what I can get. I made up our cards already and ordered them, but I'm not going to put it on here just yet. Just so those who are actually getting a card from us can see it in real life first. And if any of you want a card email me your address!

But just in case the family photo didn't turn out I was snapping pictures of everyone individually too. Alex, of course, flashed his trademark face:

And Ella struck the model pose:

And then one of the boys:

Then Ella started getting goofy:

I wonder where she gets it from.

While I'm running around snapping all these photos Anton is doing this:

Maybe for the Christmas video card? Who knows.

I tried getting the kids together, but that ended up being harder than getting the whole family together. They just didn't want to hold still:

Wait! Alex! Come back!

Then we headed down to the water to play a bit. It was a little cold, but that didn't stop Ella:

She was loving it! She ended up VERY wet.

Silly us forgot to bring an extra change of clothes for anyone. Alex wasn't a big fan of the water.

He stood just out of reach of it and acted all whiny and squeamish. Silly boy.

I let Anton have free reign of the camera for a short while, so amazingly there will be pictures of me on this blog.

Of course, only the ones I deem good enough. I left out all the ones that showed my double chin. Yuck!

Isn't my little boy the cutest thing in the whole world?

Both my boys are.

After finishing with the serious photos we let the kids play in the sand.

Ella did a good job of rubbing sand all into her wet jeans:

And then making sure her head was thoroughly covered too.

Rascal.

And of course I got a whole slew of pretty beach pictures never intended for a Christmas card.

I tried to get a picture of all our feet, but it just wasn't working out.

She is so cute! And throw a beautiful ocean behind her and it makes for the perfect photo.

Abandoned shoes.

And last, but not least, the striped beach:

They had just graded it and it matched the pier perfectly!

I was actually brave enough to take my big expensive camera out onto the beach. I'm glad I did because we got some fantastic shots!

So for those of you stuck in the middle of the snowstorm, we're thinking of you, but not really wishing to be you. We'll take our white Christmas on the white sand beach, thank you.

The First Christmas Gift

For some time now my pajama pants have been getting frailer and frailer. They've led a long and productive life, but their time was drawing to a close. One day they got a small tear in them. Slowly over the next few days the tear kept growing larger and larger until this was the result:

Oh, poor pajamas! You have been so good to me. But the time had come for a replacement of the pajamas.

Now, having been on the phone with my sister while she was shopping for my Christmas gift, I happened to know what it was. So I called and asked her permission to open it early. Permission was granted and Christmas was officially begun.

I carefully slit the tape and peeled back the paper to reveal the cutest pair of white flannel pajama pants that a girl could ever have.

(Anton tried to take a picture of me changing into them but I threatened him. He changed his mind.) See how cute they are with snowflakes? And they also have a silver pinstripe to them. And the pink ribbon draw string is fabulous.

So thank you Andrea for my first Christmas gift of the year! They are wonderful! And now you might be asking yourself, whatever happened to the trusty old jammies? Well, they went the way of all the world.