Christmas Tree

I cannot believe that it's Christmas time already!  I absolutely love Christmas!  Christmas is just a magical time of year and I love it.  We aren't planning on spending Christmas day at our house so we weren't going to buy a tree, but, my sister gave us a big present  for Christmas and told us to unwrap it immediately, and it was a Christmas tree!  We were so excited!  I hadn't realized how much I wanted a Christmas tree in my house until we were given one.

As soon as we opened the present we wanted to put the Christmas tree up.  We struggled to put it up though because we didn't have a base and didn't want to wait to get a base to put up the tree, so we went outside and found a bunch of rocks.  We  had one of those big popcorn tins from last Christmas and put the tree in the middle of it and put a bunch of rocks around the tree in the tin.  The tin kept wanting to fall over though so we put rocks all around the tin to keep it in place.  It worked pretty well and the tin has Christmas designs so it is kind of cute.  The only problem with the tin and rocks is that Kat loves grabbing the rocks and playing with them.  Nothing bad has happened yet, but I am scared that she is going to pick one up that is a little too heavy and she is going to drop it on her toes.

We decorated the tree with little white lights and Kat absolutely loved these lights.  She thought they were so fun and whenever we would unplug the Christmas lights she would ask us to turn them back on, it was kind of funny and cute.  One time Kat and I were going to leave the house, I think to go to the library, and I wanted to turn the lights off so it wouldn't accidently start a fire or so it wouldn't waste electricity.  Kat thought this was a terrible idea.  I had to get us all ready to go and then the last thing had to be unplugging the tree, and even then, Kat would run back inside screaming.  I felt bad but eventually we got out the door with the Christmas lights unplugged.

Here are some more pictures of Kat with the lights because is there anything cuter than a toddler happily looking at lights?

After we put the tree up and put the lights on the tree, Kat and I made cinnamon and apple sauce ornaments.  Kat had so much fun making them and she actually liked licking the dough, which makes me think she should have been born 10 years ago so she could cream everyone at the dreaded cinnamon challenge.

The recipe we used for making these Christmas ornaments was:

Ingredients:
2 containers of cinnamon 
3/4 cups apple sauce
Cookie cutters
Ribbon
Straw
Parchment Paper

Instructions:
1. Mix together the cinnamon and apple sauce until it makes a dark dough.
2. Roll the dough out on the Parchment 

paper (we made it about a 1/4 inch thick).
3. Use the cookie cutters to make shapes (You can also make your own shapes, I tried to make a baby Jesus).
4. Poke a hole in the ornaments with the straw.
5. Cook the ornaments at 200 degrees for 2 and a half hours, flipping occasionally. 
6. Take the cookies out and once they are cool, put the ribbon through the holes and put the ornaments on your tree.

This is what the dough should look like, I always like when recipes show what the dough should look like because I feel like so many different recipes say, "turn it into a dough" or "put enough flour in that it has a dough like texture" and I think all the recipes want the dough slightly different and I get scared that I will add a little too much of one thing or a little too little of another.

Can you find the baby Jesus?  I showed my husband my baby Jesus and he thought it was a sheep.  That was pretty embarrassing.  Finally, on his third or fourth guess, he guessed it was baby Jesus. 

When I was making Jesus, Kat kept taking Him from me and saying, "baby" and "rock".  I think she wanted to rock little baby Jesus, it was pretty cute.

It was really fun making ornaments and decorating the tree.  It ended up being a lot to do though for such a little girl and it wiped her out.

I hope she dreamed about sleigh rides and gingerbread men (actually, the first nightmare that I can remember was of me getting attacked by gingerbread men so hopefully she didn't have that dream).  Maybe she just dreamed about baby Jesus, that would be nice.