It's official

Christmas is officially here.

The kids & I are out of school/work til January 5th. The kids took their teachers a little goodie & I've brought home a bunch of Christmas gifts from the kids at my school (woohoo!!!). We've begun watching Christmas movies. The tree has presents underneath. Last night, I bought our birthday party goods (for Christmas morning) & the stuff to make the cakes & goodies for family meals.

And today is our first family get together. Yahoo! It's really Christmas!!!!!!!!!! I love this time of year!

....and on a totally unrelated note, in case you need some cute and fun holiday crafts to do with your kids, here are a few we did at school in the past couple of weeks that would be easy to re-create at home.

The first one is a Christmas tree cone. You take a sugar cone & spread green icing on it, then stick on M&Ms or gumdrops or whatever other small colorful candies you want to use for ornaments. Then the kids eat it! yummy & fun!

This is Reindeer Pudding. You take a small tart-sized graham cracker crust & fill it with chocolate pudding. Add pretzel antlers, cheerio eyes & a red candy nose & voila...you've got Rudolph. Yum!

This is a rolled-marble candy cane painting. You put the candy cane picture in a box lid or cake pan, dip a marble in red paint & drop it into the pan. The kids roll it around to paint the stripes on their candy cane. I cut these out & mounted them on red paper & laminated them.

This is a handprint wreath. Kids make a circle of green handprints, followed by some red fingertip painted 'berries'. Super easy & such a cute keepsake for mom & dad.

The kids did their handprints (with a little help since it was permanent paint!!) and then I added the other details & wrapped these for their parents' gifts. This is on a plain white pillow case. Boys did blue angel wings & girls did pink. (Melissa---I hope you don't mind me sharing Emily's!) Of course, now I'm looking at these & thinking "dang....I should've ironed those!"