Our 25 days of Christmas (which I will likely post a lot about this month) is going really well.  In addition to lighting the Christmas lights for the first time, we’ve written letters to Santa, decorated the family room, bought and donated toys to Toy Mountain, baked shortbreads, and made a gingerbread house.  The lils have really gotten into it too.  Woo walked into the house on friday and asked “do we have a christmas activity for today?”  They have both asked at least once a day ever since. I love how easily this has become a daily event for us!

I, however, have not fully thought this through.  The activities have been great fun, especially for Woo and Goose, but the last couple have focused on baking, and sweet treats.  The shortbreads that we made are delicious, and reminded me that I have ABSOLUTELY no will power when it comes to shortbread.  Their buttery, sugary goodness with a cherry on top is completely irresistible.  I think that I have eaten at least 18 cookies out of the six dozen cookies that we made today alone!  I am scared, because we need to make more for our guests arriving in a couple of weeks.  This is not going to end well for my waistline!

Today’s activity was a gingerbread house.  I caved and bought the kit from Loblaws, as I have never successfully made one from scratch, they always fall down under the weight of the icing.  I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that I start decorating too soon.  I did not want that to happen to their first gingerbread house, so kit we bought.

We set to it after “nap”*, when only the three of us were home. This was a tactical error, as it meant that I was helping both of them, catching the candies that were dropping all over the floor (those little sugar balls are hard to hold on to, apparently), and trying to take pictures.  There was no one to watch the candy eating, either.  I think that they were pretty good about it, but they very rarely get candy, so they were pretty crazy by the end.  Woo only put the icing bag in his mouth once. I am pretty sure I caught him before he ate too much!

We did settle in to a good routine after the initial excitement, and both lils were very keen on their decorating.  They each did one tree, and half of the roof. It took about an hour, and both wanted to do another tomorrow.  They ran around like crazy people for about an hour after dinner, and then both crashed pretty quickly.  Here is our finished product.  There are a few more pictures on my flickr stream.

*no one napped today, which is not the norm for Goose.  This may have contributed to the early crash.*