Crafts, Cooking and Christmas Fun!

It was so nice this year, because Zeph's old enough to really get involved and start to understand what was going on. I've been looking forward to this for ages!





Zeph made Christmas cards for the family. He loves painting, and really got into choosing what colours of paint and glitter, and spent ages deciding where to stick the stars. I'm glad he seems to like arts and crafts!




Zeph was a bit unnerved by seeing Santa. Well, it wasn't seeing him that was the problem, but having to get near enough to get his present. He was fine as long as I was next to him, and was really happy about getting his gift - he now thinks that Santa always gives you books. Mind you, he doesn't have a problem with that!




We had a nice family evening trying to assemble a sort of biscuit Christmas tree. Possibly our first mistake was in getting a cheap set of biscuits from Asda. This is what the finished result should have been.



Chris and Zeph had a lovely time using the pouch of ready-made icing (that had to be massaged until it went soft...) to stick the varying sizes of star-shaped biscuit together and to dot onto the 'branches' ready for sticking on the sugar decorations.





The finished result. Note the lack of similarity to the picture on the box...



It was already slipping sideways before we even started sticking on the sugar shapes, and by the next day had almost folded in half. After tasting bits we didn't even eat the damn thing! The biscuits had no flavour, the icing tasted about as nasty and artificial as it looked and you couldn't even bite the sugar sweeties. However, we had fun trying to put it together and that was the important thing. Next year I'm going to make a gingerbread house that we can decorate instead.


Zeph also had a lovely time making reindeer food. He scooped out porridge oats into a bowl, and mixed in some pink and purple sparkly sugar (for cake decorationg) to make it magic, then filled little paper bags with the mixture. On Christmas Eve night he went outside just before bedtime and emptied the reindeer food onto the lawn so that the reindeer could have a snack while Father Christmas brought the presents. (He gave the extra bags to his wee friends.)



All in all we had a lot of fun, and there'll be even more we can do next year!

Festive decorations in the Anderson household

Our tree with some parcels and cards underneath. Zeph helped hang the ornaments on and was really excited about hanging up the one he made and the one he was given at the library party.



These are some of my favourite tree decorations.












"Bauble Zeph did!"




We like to buy a new bauble each Christmas, something that refers to an event of that year if possible.

2008 - Three guesses where we got this! I picked it up browsing in a Perth department store with Nettie, so my little festive wombat brings back really fond memories. :-)



2009 - We bought this set of reindeer from the Cairngorm Reindeer Centre near Aviemore when we were up at Aviemore with the samba band the September before Zeph was born.



2010 - We had a huge amount of snow and ice in November and December, more than I remember seeing since I was a child, so we chose this glass bauble that has bubbles of glass inside and looks like ice drops.



2011 - There wasn't any particular reason for this one, but I just liked it!



Finally, the bauble garland that hangs across the fireplace!




P.S. I have no idea why the pictures are varying in size!