'Tis the Season

Christmas has begun at the Weber house. I have been busy shopping away and also helping the kids get into the Christmas spirit. We have been listening to lots and lots of Christmas carols (we started the day after Halloween) and now Ellie knows parts of many songs. Her favorites are Jingle Bells, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, 12 days of Christmas and the Chipmunk song. She is pretty cute singing the songs but sometimes she gets mad when her dad and I sing because she is the one who wants to sing all by herself.

We bought some lights and hung them on our little tree and and we even bought lights for outside. Daniel wasn't real excited about putting lights outside so I made him take Owen with him to pick up some dinner and us girls put up the lights this year.
Here is Owen playing with the lights. This is a smaller strand of lights that we ended up hanging up in Ellie's room. She has been enjoying them and loves to look at them.
And here is Owen tracking through the house with his lights-- you can see our little Charlie Brown tree in the background.
Last night, Elise and I made our very first batch of Christmas treats. We made sugar cookies. I was going to make them from scratch, but let's be honest, that would be more stress than I need right now. Plus, we are going to do lots of baking this year so best to keep it simple.
Owen was super cranky while we were making the cookies. He decided he wasn't interested in taking his afternoon nap because he napped a little bit in the car while I was running errands in the morning. So, he finally napped around four o'clock and we woke him up around 5:30 and he was not pleased about that!

After convincing Ellie that we had to wait to decorate the cookies until after dinner, we decorated! Ellie started doing the frosting and then decided that she was the sprinkle girl and mom could do all the icing. I was fine with that because it made the process go a lot faster.

Ellie showing off her work. (You can barely see Owen in the right hand upper corner of this picture.. he is on his way behind the couch to pull out the lights on the tree... little stinker).

Elise really liked decorating cookies. She has always LOVED helping me (or anyone else brave enough to let her help them) cook and bake. She likes to bake mostly because she can gorge herself on icing and batter.

The end product! Not bad considering this was our first baking batch of Christmas goods. They look pretty good, but to be honest I didn't even taste them. We took them to some friends' houses for them to enjoy. We certainly don't need all those cookies (all those MESSY cookies) around our house.

Here is our little Christmas tree. It looks a little sadder in this picture than it looks in person. We haven't done ornaments yet because Daniel hasn't been able to find the box labeled "Christmas" among all the other MANY boxes in the attic. I am still hopeful that it will be found :).