"On the first day of Christmas"

Okay, so it's not technically the "first day of Christmas" but... we are doing some things differently this year. For one thing.. I decided that I didn't like Christmas day to be a gigantic flury of opening presents. I mean.. really.. WHY do I spend the entire month of December making gifts and dealing with my own deadline rather than spending extra time together and doing fun stuff during the whole season?

This year the girls each got to pick out a little toy in November to get out that "I want this for Christmas" mood... Lily had a lot of ideas of what she wanted and had to pick her one favorite. It's great because she's STILL playing with it (and we let them open those toys right when we decorated after Thanksgiving) and she hasn't been as fretful and telling me what she wanted, because.. she already got that special thing. Well.. I decided that I wanted to pick something out for them as well and so they got one other toy for Christmas.. which is what they are holding in the picture above. And they got to open them today after Daddy got home!
While I was setting up dinner and Youssef was helping, the girls played happily with their new toys (that they opened right when Daddy got home) and the rest of the night was enjoying fondue together... which we will be having a lot more of in the following weeks!
We put a tea candle under the fondue pot instead of the oil thing... the tea candle kept it from getting cold but didn't make it boil like the other annoying thing did! Anyway, it was a great temperature for the girls and they were totally into dipping. :]
Renna was into it for really the first time too which was fun! She didn't always dip, but liked the special forks and foods. I love making this for dinner because we just keep having leftovers and keep adding to the leftovers and the meal just keeps lasting. :]
This was about 7 at night I guess, but the girls have been wearing their new jammies pretty much all the time.

After dinner I made some homemade dark hot chocolate (I'm getting good at making it *just* right) for our dessert and we all got a candy can. Just got my order today from this natural candy place! I've got it all rationed out for December and some of the candy I ordered will be for stockings or even later for the girls birthdays and so forth. Lily is holding up a maraschino cherry. I got a jar of them from that same candy place. They are more for Youssef and the girls since I'm not super into them, but they tasted right and didn't have all the nasty stuff that the "normal" ones have.


I didn't load pictures of this, but after dessert we read from the "Christmas Carol" while Youssef colored with the girls.

This is pretty much how our Christmas times will be going... special fondue dinners together and reading and playing together. I also just got my order today for four kid games. We do a "game night" every week and didn't have much of a selection, so each week in this month the girls will get to unwrap a new game for game night and we'll get to play it together till there's just one left on Christmas. They won't get any toys on Christmas from us.. just some tiny stocking stuffer things for fun, like play dough and a little sticker book and small stuff like that from the dollar store (along with some candy again) .. anyway.. it will just be fun, but not the giant flury of unwrapping all at once thing. No, we'll enjoy and savor all of this and being together for the whole month!

So far it's been really great! Just enough anticipation without anyone losing the excitement (from the anticipation getting drug out too long), fun movies like the VeggieTale ones and good opportunities to talk to the girls about Jesus and why we celebrate certain things. I've got some ideas floating around for a better way to organize what I want to teach them during this season and what I'd like to focus on... I decided not to try to do it THIS year, but perhaps a children's book will need to be created that I can use with my own family. We'll see. :]