Christmas Happenings

December was a month that was extremely busy! I was determined to grab on and enjoy as much as possible. I didn't blog much, hardly creeped Facebook and barely tweeted. Now that life has slowed down a little while we enjoy the rest of our break, I thought that I better get some of this up before school starts again and we are back to our fast paced shenanigans. 

Our orange tree delivered a huge number of oranges. Last year we got just a few, but this year...whew! I had laundry baskets, huge bags, bowls, and other vessels full of oranges. I have just about been "oranged" out! We have had juice, muffins, cookies and cakes with oranges, lots of eating them whole as a snack. I took a bag full of them and kept them in my fridge at school for quick snacks. We gave away TONS! It has been fun and they are delicious.

I used my juicer to "juice" a gallon jug full of O.J. I have decided that it has a better flavor to hand squeeze it rather than run it through the juicer, just in case anyone wanted to know.

My kids had to come along to the community tree lighting as my elementary choir performed. That was fun. (not) I paid Grace to be my babysitter and she was not very impressed with the whole thing. She informed me afterwards that I would not ever be a grandmother because of her, she planned to not have any kids, ever.

We got our tree. The whole tree lot could hear us coming. There was some excitement in the air!

I had one of my best ideas ever! Of course, I completely made it up on the fly because I had not thawed out any meat for dinner. We will keep that part a secret. :)

While we were getting our Santa letters ready (see the catalogs and such on the table), we had a "Santa Dinner." I made hot cocoa with marshmallows, sugar cookies with icing and sprinkles, and popcorn. Of course the kids were thrilled with such a great menu!

Shane and his staff hosted Snowfest 2012 and we managed to get there a smidgen early and ride the snow hill a couple of times before everyone else showed up and the lines got really long.

Landry was very concerned about getting the stockings up and ready.

We also managed to catch a parade. The kids caught lots of candy. I'll have to post more Christmas happenings later...