A snow day on Friday gave us a headstart on a weekend of baking, baking, and more baking!
Our new recipe this year was Raspberry Stars.
They involve butter cookie dough, raspberry jam, and anise icing.
I ended up making three more batches of these to feed the voracious appetite of my friends and family! Needless to say, they're a keeper!
We also found a new recipe for paint-on sugar cookie icing.
Nicky liked to paint his cookies wild colors.
Kairi was more traditional.
I loved the way this Santa of mine turned out. All together, though, I think they were the best looking sugar cookies we ever made!
They dried nice and hard, too, so we were able to stack them in tins for the kids teachers with all of the other cookies we made. What else did we make? Well...
Here's what's left AFTER we filled nine cookie tins, plus two big trays for my work and Scott's! Cyndy, Faith, and Juli came over for a little while Saturday morning and helped with the reindeer and peanut blossoms. Kai worked on the Hello Dollies. And I made the double decker peanut butter fudge, although I ended up making two more batches of that as well! Nick and Scott made some delicious LOOKING peppermint brownies, but they must have missed a step because they wouldn't bake and just stayed runny, which was really too bad, since there weren't any more peppermint chips at the store. We never did get to the Candy Cane cookies, or the traditional fudge. But no one was complaining!
We were really late decorating for Christmas this year! We just couldn't find time to get a tree. By the time we looked, the high school band sale was sold out of trees. We ended up having to drive into Quakertown and pick up a tree at Country Junction. Here's a few decorating pictures:
This was unquestionably our worst Christmas program ever. The kids looked adorable, of course, and they tried really hard.
Unfortunately, we had two three year olds, and one cried all the way through the second rehearsal, so I couldn't help the kids correct their mistakes much. And then, a kindergartener threw up their green cupcake all over the party. By the next day, four kids were throwing up (including Faith, who had to go home and the actress playing Mary). Everyone was confused and forgot their cues. The program we picked was not the best either. It depicts a writer trying to rewrite the Christmas story and make it more modern. The funniest lines are the kids, though, and no one could hear them, or they flubbed and skipped big chunks of dialogue because we didn't practice enough and I thought it would be okay, since the writer was doing rewrites if they read off their scripts instead of memorized. It was a fiasco. At that point, I was glad that we are taking a year off from Sunday School and the Christmas and Easter programs! Maybe by the time we come "back" to Children's Ministry, we'll have fresh ideas.
Same goes with Nick - is Santa laughing at his tough guy hands in the pocket pose?
She didn't have a problem with the present he brought her, though!!
We were also "proud" of Nicky - this is the first band concert we've ever attended where he didn't fall asleep halfway through! No, we didn't dress him up like Santa on purpose - he's coming from TKD and the hat was in the car.
Calvary Baptist presented "A Night In Bethlehem" this year. We were the directors and decorators, and our whole family had roles in the production. It was a blast, and everyone who went to the event really seemed to enjoy it and get a lot out of it.
The weaver even had a young apprentice to help some of the kids with their basket weaving. (Doesn't she look cute?)
The fun didn't stop there, though. Wandering around the Bethlehem streets were a variety of Bible times characters, including this ragamuffinly beggar.
The tax collector stopped at each shopkeeper for his due.
And best of all, the shephards gathered up groups of people to visit the stable and meet the new parents of Jesus. (The stable was supposed to be outside, but it actually started snowing pretty heavily - so we made a quick change!)
