It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas!

Our new carpet is finally in and we were finally able to get our Christmas tree up!

(The photo looks good, but the attempt to have the baby put the star on top of the tree was not so very successful, let's just say)

We spent all weekend moving furniture back into the living room and making sure everything was placed just so. I rearranged a few things in here and changed how the books were placed on the shelves. Everything also got a good cleaning and all the wooden furniture got polished with a 50/50 mixture of lemon juice and olive oil. I'm telling you, that stuff works SO much better than anything you can buy, and it's all natural.

After all of the business stuff was done, we got to work with decorations. I decided not to put everything out this year because of Mr. Bubba Grabby-Hands. The tree is up, but it has no ornaments. I plan to put gingerbread cookies with white icing on it. That way, if he gets any off and breaks or eats them, it's not a big deal.

I hung the felt circle garland I made last year over a mirror, between the two tall bookshelves, and a faux pine garland on the shelf over the television. I've been clipping the Christmas cards we've received to it using teeny clothespins. Remember when those were THE thing in scrapbooking? Yeah, they were in the jar with my watch crystals, ha ha!

Here is a photo of the Eddie Ross wreath that I talked about in my last post. You can see that the bow just fills the blank spot in the wire. I know that purple in the ribbon doesn't really match, but I had this small piece that was just enough for this and wanted to use it up, so there you go.

Last August we found a Playmobil nativity at a local toystore, so I bought that. I feel it's important for Bubba to grow up knowing the meaning behind Christmas, and not just the Santa part. I didn't put out everything, because it has a TON of teensy parts. Just the basics, plus the larger animals. The baby Jesus is still in the box and won't come out until Christmas day.

I baked a whole slew of gingerbread (for the tree mostly) and sugar cookies yesterday, and stayed up all night icing them. I'll take photos of them tomorrow morning before I bag them up for delivery. I think they came out really cute. I posted some bad iPhone photos of them on Facebook, so if you're my friend on there you can check them out.

Tonight I decided to try something completely new - marshmallows! I've never attempted any sort of candy making before, because working with molten, bubbling sugar scares the crap out of me. I think I've mentioned before just how clumsy I am! Nevertheless, since Jaimee Rose said they were easy, I decided, what the heck? So there is my "New Thing" for December.

I've never worked with the unflavored Knox gelatine before either. It's really weird and smells funny! I also had to run to Michael's to pick up a candy thermometer. I have so many thermometers in this house, but due to never having made candy (not even fudge) I didn't have one of those. Hooray for 50% off coupons!

I doubled Martha's recipe, and I'm happy to report, they came out wonderfully. They're big, so you would only need one or two for a mug of cocoa. They're a slightly different texture than store bought ones, and are flavored with a teeny hint of peppermint. I swirled on red food coloring, per Martha's instructions. Word to the wise - when the woman says work quickly, do it! on one batch, the coloring set on top too long and it sank through to the bottom of the marshmallow mixture, resulting in the color not being swirled through. When I cut them apart, there were these tiny wells of red color that made them look like they were bleeding!!!

I bought the jars at Dollar Tree, and plan to make labels for them and hand them out as gifts. I think I may have to go back and buy a few more.

So that is Christmas here so far! I'm working on my December Daily, and I'll try to post what I've done so far soon. No promises though. I still have quite a bit of sewing to do in the next ten days so I'll be very busy. We've also got tamales coming up this weekend!

It's the most BUSY - uh, I mean wonderful - time of the year!