Christmas Decorations Part 2

I know it's after Christmas, but I thought you still might enjoy seeing more Christmas decorations.

Here are some of my favorite ornaments from our tree:

These bells are Mara's.	I really like this cardinal.
Dad says this is his favorite ornament.	You can't really see her, but this ballerina spins in a circle!
We always use this tree topper.	The spinning carousel is Helena's.

Christmas Cookies

Our other Christmasy day-before-Thanksgiving activity was baking cookies.

We made three kinds: sugar cookies (with no frosting), peanut butter cookies (with peanut butter cups), and ginger thins. We listened to Mannheim Steamroller Christmas CDs while we were working, which was fun.

The sugar cookies were "Sugar Drop Cookies with Oil", from Joy of Cooking.

Lots of ingredients.

Putting dry ingredients in the sifter...it looks like a snowy mountain.

It looks like snow after you put it in the sifter too.
You can see it falling!

You make little balls of dough and roll them in a bowl of sugar.
This is a good time to take a lot of tastes of the dough.

Benedick washed the cookie sheets as we emptied them.

Finished sugar cookies! Don't they look good?

We got the recipe for the peanut butter cookies from a recipe Mom got from a friend a while back.

Making the peanut butter cookies.

The dough in the fridge next to our Thanksgiving turkey.

Peanut butter cups ready to go on the cookies.

Finished peanut butter cookies!

The last cookies were Helena's specialty: Ginger Thins from Joy of Cooking. Helena always says she will never make them again, because they are so much work, but Mara talked her into it.

Helena making the ginger thins.

The finished ginger thins!

We're going to send some of the cookies to friends away at college, but we definitely get some for ourselves too. I wish all of you were here to help taste them too!

Christmas Decorations Part 1

I know for some people it just isn't done, but we started putting up our Christmas decorations the day before Thanksgiving.

It was Mara's and my idea to buy additional decorations and put them up this early. Normally we just do a tree and a Nativity and Christmas lights, but we decided we wanted more greenery this year, so we bought some garlands and wreaths (all fake, so we'll be able to reuse them in the future).

Here's a before picture:

Our entryway as seen from the front door

Michael's had all their Christmas decorations on sale, and a 20% off your entire purchase coupon in addition. So for less than $20, we got:

Christmas supplies

Two 18-inch wreaths, two 18-foot garlands, red ribbon, 70 jingle bells, and several miscellaneous gold and red wreath picks.

Eighteen feet is a lot!

Mara hung the garland in the entryway.

We used little pieces of green pipe cleaner, so that it would blend in. We then twisted it around a couple little nails that we put up. We also did the same thing with jingle bells:

Garland with jingle bells

 Here's the after picture:

Decorated entryway as seen from the front door

We still haven't put up the wreaths or the other garland (we can't decide where to put it) but we will put them up soon.