Christmas Tree Decorating

I am super behind in posting...so you are getting Christmas tree decorating photos in January. Hopefully this year my blogging will be a little more frequent than last year!

We had to get our Christmas tree at Home Depot this year. It was very sad, we ALWAYS go and cut our own tree down, but this year every chance we had to go it was raining. It was even raining the day we went to Home Depot to get our tree, luckily they had all the trees in a nice, dry tent. We did get a great tree, so I can't complain too much.

Dylan LOVES to help decorate the house during the holidays and especially the Christmas tree. Dave not so much. I'm happy to have my little buddy help me though!

Christmas favorite

Dylan's favorite Christmas presents, transformers!

Merry Christmas!

From our family to yours we hope you have a wonderful Christmas!

Peanut Butter Blossoms

I started my Christmas baking this afternoon! I was going to start by making peppermint bark, but I realized that I bought regular graham crackers instead of chocolate, doh! So instead I started with a favorite of Dave's, Peanut Butter Blossoms. I used the recipe from our family cookbook and my Aunt Janet. The recipe is perfect and the cookies always turn out great! I love that the recipe calls for chocolate stars. I remember when my Grandma would make these cookies she always used chocolate stars. They were perfect for the cookies because they are flatter so you got more chocolate and cookie per bite. I always look for the chocolate stars at the store, but can never find them. I need to remember to look at Mast General Store next time we go and see if they are in the "nostalgic" candy section.

I will be baking all this week, so stay tuned for more recipes!

The recipe

What you will need + salt

Butter vanilla isn't required, but it's awesome for baking. I got it for my birthday from Melea  along with some truffle oil  I have yet to try. If you see this Butter vanilla buy it, you won't be disappointed!

Do you like my mixer? My mom gave it to me when I was in college and it was old then, it's old now, but it still works great. I do have a kitchen aid standing mixer (thanks Mom!) but I can't keep it on my counter top, so I don't use it very often. Which is what my Mom said would happen, see, Mom IS always right!

The finished product! I love how the kisses get all shiny after being in the oven for a few minutes! 

Two-Fer Tuesday

Making cookies

Dylan and I made cutout sugar cookies this morning! He did an awesome job using the cookie cutters and decorating!

Lights, Santa, and Ponies

Last night we piled in the Jeep and headed up to Smokies Stadium to see the light show and other Christmas attractions. We had heard everything was free, which was not the case, it was $20 to see the light show. Which we thought was  a little pricey, especially considering we had heard it was free, but we drove through anyway. The light show was really very good and there were a ton of lights that were synchronized to the radio station we had turned to when we started our drive.



After we drove through the light show we headed over to the petting zoo. They had camels and ponies that the kids could ride ($5 per ride) and lots of animals, llamas, sheep, sheep with horn sideburns, cows, and more. Dylan LOVES animals and petting zoos, he could have stayed there all night visiting all of the animals, but we broke him away to see if he would visit Santa.
Luckily there was only one person in front of us so we figured we wouldn't have to wait to long to see Santa. However, this Santa was VERY chatty and was still chatting with the little boy on his lap when Dylan had enough and wanted to go back to the petting zoo. We talked to him about going and sitting on Santa's lap and telling Santa what he wanted for Christmas, but the allure of the petting zoo was calling him so we had to head back to the zoo. No Santa visit for Dylan this year, maybe next year...
Dylan did ride a pony all by himself though (OK, Dave was standing next to him to make sure Dylan didn't fall off). But he loved riding Strawberry the pony, I think that was the highlight of his night.

Two-Fer Tuesday

The Christmas Past Edition!

Dylan's 1st Christmas, 2008, with Uncle Kyle.

Christmas 2009, in Iowa, Me, Dylan, Mom & Dana

What makes people go crazy?

Do you really want to know what makes things crazy at our house before Christmas? It's not shopping for the presents, finding time to decorate the house and Christmas tree, no it's finding or taking the photo for our Christmas card! Luckily we were in Chicago this year for Thanksgiving and made a trip downtown to Daley Plaza to see the huge Christmas tree. Dana suggested that would be the perfect spot for our Christmas card photo and we were hoping that she was right! You know what it's like, either you get lucky sometime throughout the year and get a great photo or struggle to take one the day before you need to order your cards. The past few years, we've been in the latter category. I'm blaming Dylan, it's hard to get a good photo of someone 2 and under :)

We did get a good photo in front of the big Christmas tree though, we were lucky this year! Now I needed to find the right photo card to go with the photo. Fortunately, Shutterfly has hundreds of options to make sure there is something that will go with every photo. Do I choose this one? I like this one too! This could be it...Maybe this is the hard part, deciding what card to choose! I guess you will just have to wait and see! It is fun to look through the designs and see what one will work best with our photo.

Maybe some thank-you notes too... :)