Reindeer Food

Today Fletcher and his friends made reindeer food. One of our favorite Christmas traditions is making reindeer food to sprinkle on the lawn on Christmas Eve for Santa's reindeer to eat. We use small glass canning jars and layer oatmeal, sugar, crushed peppermint, and sprinkles (commonly known as the favorites of reindeer) until our jars are full. We print labels and color them and tie them on with ribbon. The labels have this poem:

Sprinkle on your lawn at night
The moon will make it sparkle bright
Santa's reindeer fly and roam
This will guide them to your home!

On Christmas Eve, after leaving treats by the tree for Santa, we go out and sprinkle the reindeer food on the grass! It's all gone in the morning, so we know the reindeer loved it!

Christmas Workshop

Today was a special day at Fletcher's school: the Christmas Workshop. Moms and Dads were invited to come early and hear the children recite a beautiful poem with hand motions (that made this mommy teary-eyed) and sing Jingle Bells together as a group. Then everyone made Christmas cards for the residents of the Pines, a local retirement community. Afterwards we made a Merry Mix with pretzels, M&M's, peppermint, and marshmallows to take home. It was so nice to see Fletcher interacting with his classmates and to spend time together doing holiday stuff!

Santa Train

This afternoon we went to Spenser, NC to the Transportation Museum to ride the Santa Train. Ed and Fletcher went last year and I was excited to get to go with them this year. We enjoyed riding the train, seeing Santa, sitting in an antique fire truck and seeing all the trains. It was a fun and beautiful (and unseasonably warm) day!

Holiday Fun

Boy, we've had a busy week! I guess they will all be that way until Christmas. But it's been a fun week, doing lots of festive holiday stuff. At home we've been making lots of decorations and ornaments for our tree with our friends, Isabelle and Cam. The past 2 days Fletcher and I have also crushed 4 dozen candy canes for holiday cooking and projects, made 2 dozen waffles for freezing, and 2 dozen pumpkin muffins (from Emily's wonderfully delicious recipe), also for freezing. We made what seemed like a million sugarplums (marshmallows dipped in candy and sprinkles) yesterday, too.

Over the week I made 40 Christmas cards (in addition to the 30 I had already made earlier, last month) and finally choose a picture to go inside. While Ed and Fletcher were at a birthday party yesterday morning, I got them all addressed and Ed helped me lick envelops last night so you should all be getting your Christmas cards this week!

And...we were back to Meg-Art on Wednesday afternoon to paint some more pottery for Christmas gifts. Whew! Oh! And I also did all my Christmas shopping (2 stores and online) on Friday morning! Busy week, but fun and festive!

Tis the Season

Today we kicked off the holiday season with one of our favorite traditions: BBQ at the American Legion followed by the Christmas Parade! The food was great! Fletcher enjoyed playing on the playground before the parade. We sat with Tonya and her family again this year and enjoyed each others company. Fletcher's favorite part of the parade was a mini VW bug and conducting the marching band with the baton he brought from home, mine was the dance troops, and Ed's was seeing a friend from college that he had not seen in 15 years or so.

Christmas in Davidson

Ate (more) pizza at Fuel, heard some cool bluegrass music, met up with Tonya and her crew, saw a live nativity and animals (camel, goats, miniature horse and cow), got to sit in a firetruck, made an ornament, and heard some great singing (Dicken's carolers and Babershop). Very enjoyable and festive evening in Davidson! (I do not take good night time pictures!)

St. Alban's Spirit Night

Wednesday night was St. Alban's Spirit Night at Procuitio's Pizza in Cornelius. There was a great turn out and we enjoyed seeing a lot of our school friends and eating pizza at one of our favorite places!