When I saw this adorable Melted Snowman project on The Devine Home, I knew this would be perfect for our Georgia home.  My four year old and I had lots of fun making it!

First, pour a couple cups of sugar onto a domed cake platter.  Then pick out 5 black and 1 orange button for the eyes, nose and mouth.  Add twigs for arms, and pop on the dome.  For a hat, we used an old Christmas tree ornament from Texas.  A camouflage scarf tied around the cake stand base completes the look!

I purchased some snowy window clings for this project, as you see in the original (at the link above), but of course I lost them (and the matching buttons!) somewhere in our Christmas shuffle.  We were able to find enough buttons in our button box, but the window clings will have to wait for another day.  Maybe when I start wrapping gifts I’ll stumble across them!

This post is part of the Home-Spun Holidays blog carnival, which is being held at Mentoring Moments for Christian Women.  The theme of the carnival is to share the simple, inexpensive things you do at home to make the Christmas season memorable.  On my Counter-cultural Mom blog, I’ve shared some of the ways we celebrate Christ’s birth during this season. This post is about some of the things we do just for fun.

There are lots of things we do for fun during the holiday season right here at home.  I do a lot of my shopping online, and once the holiday packages start arriving, the kids enjoy making box robots.  They have lots of fun constructing the robots and then playing with each other in their new costumes.

Every year my husband sets up a little Christmas village and a train around the base of the tree. We all love to turn the lights out and light up the tree and the village, and watch the train chug around the track. It’s so relaxing and fun. The boys can often be found sitting by the tree watching the train. This is one of our favorite traditions.

Our boys love to drag their bedding out by the Christmas tree and have a “sleepover” together.  They put Christmas music on and fall asleep to the sounds of the season and the twinkling of the tree lights.  I sneak in once they are asleep and turn off the music and the lights.  I snapped this picture last weekend.

It seems almost too silly to mention, but one of the kid’s favorite things is to hide army men in the Christmas tree!  They love to pretend these army men are spying on me during the Christmas season, and they take it on as a challenge to hide them so well that I can’t find them.  When I pull the tree out every year I find army men that have spent the winter in the tree, never having been found.  The boys love that, because it means they did their job right.

Making Gingerbread houses is another beloved tradition. I’ll be writing more about that later this month.

My younger boys still enjoy setting up the Nativity set. We have 4 different sets and two stables, and I put them all out at once. When I am reading aloud to them, they like to play with the little figures and set up the scene.

What do you do to celebrate the Christmas season?  If you blog about it, please link your post to the Mentoring Moments blog carnival.  It will run from December 6-12th.

December brings big changes to our schedule. And it is finally here! I’m so excited.

We’ll be working hard to finish up any outstanding work from this semester so that we can phase in our favorite Christmas-related projects. This year, instead of making our traditional Gingerbread Houses we plan to do Gingerbread Castles (we are studying the Middle Ages, after all!) Copywork will take on a Christmas theme. I’m looking forward to baking, decorating and reading by the fire.  Advent starts in full swing tonight, too.

Plans for this Christmas season have been in the works around here since October! That’s when work began on the annual Mentoring Moments 12 Days of Christmas articles. I put this year’s content together, so I got a sneak peak at everything our writers submitted.  It is going to be a wonderful series, so I encourage you to head over there and subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!  Christmas party ideas, thoughtful devotions, crafts for kids, recipes, decorating tips and much more round out this series.  We’ll be posting several new articles daily for the first 12 days, and one more article daily for the rest of the month.

Today’s content includes my article about holding a Gingerbread House party for kids, a yummy punch recipe,  a wonderful idea for creating a Goody Basket for each day’s Christmas-related activities courtesy of Brenda (from The Tie that Binds and Joyful Holidays) and my devotional thoughts about finding spiritual refreshment during this hectic season.

I hope you’ll check it out!  I also wanted to give a heads up to you fellow bloggers!  Mentoring Moments will be hosting a blog carnival which begins December 6th, titled Homespun Holiday Traditions.  To participate, please write a post on your blog this week about something simple and inexpensive you do at home to make the season special.  Head on over to Mentoring Moments on the 6th and add your post URL to the MckLinky at the bottom of the post.

For the party, I hid favors in plastic boxes with lids. I bought the boxes, as well as most of the favors, at the Dollar store. Some boxes held candy, such as Pez or lollipops, other boxes had toys and trinkets. One box had goggles and splash balls and another had an assortment of treasures to choose from, such as fishing lures, pocket flashlights, baseball cards and $1 hand-held games. We hid 7 caches for this party.

Before the party, my oldest son and I hid the boxes in various places around our neighborhood. We have a lot of woodsy areas in our neighborhood, but I still made sure to mark each cache with a clearly marked sign, reading “Official Birthday Party Geocache”, in case a neighbor found it before the kids. If you were holding a party like this one in a public park this would be even more important, as some official geocache boxes have been mistaken for bombs in the past!

We took care to spread out the hiding places so the kids would have to work to find the treasure. After hiding the box, you stand over the location with the GPS unit and mark the location. Be sure to title it so you can find it later. We just titled each location BP 1 (Birthday party 1), BP 2, and so on.

Continue hiding all the boxes and marking all the locations. By putting all the “way points” into the GPS unit, the kids can just select each way point in order and move independently from one cache to the next. We only have one GPS unit, so the birthday boys took turns looking up the next way point and leading the group to the next cache location.

The children were given a page with encrypted clues, one for each location. Many geocaches have clue sheets like this, so we enjoyed adding that authentic touch. Some of the kids loved hiking around looking for the caches, while others enjoyed pausing to try and solve the puzzles. The clues all had something to do with the hiding place, such as “It will take a miracle to find this one!” for a cache hidden near a bag of Miracle Grow potting soil. My son encrypted the clues, and included this decryption key at the bottom of the clue sheet:

Decryption Key
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
————————-
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z
(letter above equals below,
and vice versa)

The GPS unit is accurate to within 50 feet, so there is still some hunting involved even when you get to the location. We hid some of the boxes pretty well, and others were easier to find. The kids had fun looking for the caches, and some of the clues came in handy when a cache could not be immediately spotted.

Everyone was eager to see what was hidden in each cache! The kids each took a paper lunch sack along on their hunt to carry all their treasures in. I put drink boxes in the fourth cache, as I knew they would be getting thirsty by that point. Remind the kids to bring the empty cache boxes back so that you won’t have to retrieve them at the end of the party!

The clue for the last cache said “Cake and Ice Cream” when it was decrypted. We marked our kitchen for that way point, and the GPS led the kids back to the house for the rest of the party.

I’m not very crafty, but I tried to make the cake look like our hand-held GPS unit.

Fun was had by all!

My book is just a simple journal. For those of you who are more crafts-oriented than I am, check out Our Christmas Mosaic for a beautiful example of what you could do for your Christmas journal. Why not take a few minutes over the holiday weekend to jot down some of your favorite memories from this season?

We keep a more detailed record of God’s goodness to us over the course of the year, which we take time to write as a family over the New Year’s holiday each year. For details on how to keep a journal like that, check out my post Memorial Stones on Counter-cultural Mom blog.

I’ll have some funny things to write in our Christmas journal this year. Every year we do a Jesse Tree, hanging ornaments that trace God’s sovereign plan from the book of Genesis through to the birth of Jesus.

One night we were studying Abraham and Isaac, and I held up a small plastic playmobil knife that would be that evening’s ornament. I asked the boys if they could remember what the knife reminded us of. I thought this would be simple for them, as we have been reading through the Old Testament this year.

After a couple wrong guesses my husband said, “Think of Abraham, boys! It has something to do with him!” Our six year old immediately answered, “I know!! It reminds us of circumcision!” We all had a good laugh at that one. Yes, God did ask Abraham and all the Israelites to be circumcised, but that wasn’t quite what we were going for!

We also read The Advent Book each night during devotions. Every night we start from the beginning and add the new day’s page. Over the course of the month our children become very familiar with the biblical account of Jesus’ birth.

One night as my husband read the words “At the sound of Mary’s greeting, the baby inside Elizabeth….” and our three year old supplied the words, “Jumped for joy!”

Our young son went on to say, “The question is…WHY did the baby jump for joy?” My husband thought this was a profound question from one so young, and he took the opportunity to probe further. He asked our preschooler, “If you were in Elizabeth’s tummy, do you think you would have jumped for joy?” To which our little boy responded, “If I was in her tummy, and if I had a knife with me, I would have cut my way out!”

After a moment of shocked silence we all burst out laughing. My mother in law was with us and she was a good sport, pointing out that it would have been “a cesarean in the time of Caesar!”

The advent wreath is very symbolic. The circular wreath reminds us of eternity, and that God has no beginning or end. The wreath should always be made of evergreen branches, which never die. This reminds us that Christ was raised from the dead and is alive, never to die again. It also points us to our hope of eternal life in Christ.

Some people put holly berries on the wreath to remind them of drops of Christ’s blood. In our family we place a silk rose on the wreath to remind us of Jesus, the Rose of Sharon. The candles, taken together, remind us of Christ’s light, coming into the world. Each Sunday in advent a new candle is lit. As each week passes, the previous week’s candles are lit along with the new candle, until on Christmas day, all 5 candles burn brightly as a symbol that Christ’s light has come into the world. The primary focus of the candles is on increasing light. As the weeks pass, our expectation and anticipation grows until on Christmas day all the candles are lit and we rejoice. “Joy to the World, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King!”

Each individual candle has its own unique meaning. Traditionally, there are 3 purple candles, symbolizing royalty. It can be hard to find purple candles, so sometimes blue candles, which represent hope, are substituted. There is also one pink candle on the wreath, which is always lit the 3rd Sunday in Advent, and a larger white candle in the center.

Cal blowing out the advent candles last year. As you can see, I had two pink candles instead of one. I couldn’t find enough purple candles, so I used what I had on hand. The symbolism of the different colored candles is nice, but I am not legalistic about it, personally. I do my best and don’t stress over the rest!

On the first Sunday of Advent, which is celebrated 4 Sundays before Christmas, the first purple candle is lit. This candle is traditionally the candle of prophecy, when we remember the many prophecies that were told about Jesus before his birth.

Isaiah 9 is a good passage to read when lighting this candle.

“The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned…”

…For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace
there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
with justice and righteousness
from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.”

O Come, O Come, Immanuel is a good song to sing the first Sunday of Advent.

On the second Sunday in Advent, two candles are lit. The second purple candle represents the Angels. An angel appeared to Mary to tell her she would give birth to a son, and an angel appeared to Joseph to tell him this child was conceived by the Holy Spirit. When Jesus was born, the angels appeared in the sky singing praises. A good song for this week might be Angels We Have Heard on High or Hark the Herald Angels Sing.

The third candle to be lit is the pink or rose colored candle. The pink candle represents joy, and the third week we think about the Shepherds who were out in the fields at night when suddenly, we read in Luke 2, an angel of the Lord appeared to them and they were afraid. “But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.'” The First Noel would be an appropriate song for this week.

The fourth candle is lit the Sunday before Christmas. This candle represents the Magi, who followed a star from far off to visit the Christ child. They brought him gifts and worshiped him, and returned home by another way rather than betray Him to Herod who was seeking to kill the child. We Three Kings is a great song for this week.

On Christmas Day the final candle is lit. The large white candle in the center of the wreath is the Christ candle. This candle reminds us of the light of the world, our Savior, Jesus Christ.

We read in John 1: 1-5,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.”

To decorate the houses, make up another large batch of frosting, adjusting this recipe as needed, based on the number of houses you are covering.

Frosting “glue” recipe:

1 lb. powdered sugar
3 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. vanilla
3 Tbsp. milk

Blend powdered sugar and butter together, add vanilla and milk, beating until smooth. Add more sugar if the mixture is too runny, or more milk, one teaspoon at a time, if the glue is too thick to spread.

Set each child up with a work station: their gingerbread house on its stable platform and a place to corral all their candies.

I bought all kinds of vintage candies this year at a local farmer’s market. Any candies that the kids like will do, but I thought it would be fun this year to experiment with making old-fashioned looking houses.

We had peppermint sticks and peppermint chunks, crystal clear rock candy, sour cherries, licorice, hard candies, coconut, chocolate wafer cookies, Smarties, sprinkles, colored sugars, Swedish fish, jelly beans and mini marshmallows. You could also use pretzels, Frosted Mini Wheats for snowy roof shingles, gumdrops…the sky is the limit!

To attach the candies, fill a sandwich sized ziploc bag with frosting. Press out all the air and seal the bag. Push the frosting to the corner of the bag. It can be hard for little hands to hold the bag in such a way as to keep the frosting in the corner…tying off the top (empty) part of the bag with a rubber band can help. Cut a very small corner off the edge of the bag and pipe the frosting out through the hole. If you make this hole too big it will end up very messy!

Our youngest children found this way too frustrating and ended up slathering on the frosting with little spreader knives and even with their fingers.

Show the kids how to pipe rows of frosting on the roof and sides. They won’t need help figuring out how to place the candy! From here on out, your main task will be ensuring that they put at least as much candy on the house as they do in their mouths!

As I wrote in Gingerbread Houses: Construction, I had trouble making part of the roof and used cardboard. It didn’t stick that well on a couple of the houses. My 3 year old had the idea of using a cookie, which worked just fine and looked great!

Everyone was proud of the results!

One thing I enjoy about this activity is that I can see each child’s personality reflected in their creation.

My orderly child made this house.

One of my children is very artistic but completely disorganized in an oblivious kind of way. Here is his house.

All my boys seemed to focus more on the landscape around the house than on the house itself. Large portions of the houses were left bare, but they used gobs of mini marshmallows to construct fishing snowmen, lumberjacks stacking peppermint logs, blue frosting ponds stocked with red Swedish fish, a peppermint stick “North Pole” and snowmen tending flower and vegetable gardens.

The grandmas and I surmised that girls “decorate” while boys “build”.

One little boy got a little carried away with his house. We set the houses aside to dry and when we came back later, his looked like it had been hit by a candy avalanche. The weight of the candy on top caused the roof to cave in so that it needed to be propped up with long peppermint sticks!

Last year we made gingerbread houses for the first time. Everyone had so much fun that we immediately decided it should become a yearly tradition.

Here is a photo from last year:

I constructed the houses tonight. They need to be made in advance so that the frosting can harden. The kids aren’t that interested in building them anyway. They just want to frost them and put the candy on!

My three year old asked for a gingerbread square tonight while I was putting the houses together. After tasting it, he said, “This doesn’t taste like gingerbread! This tastes like a graham cracker!” That’s because it is a graham cracker! I don’t buy the fancy kits that cost a lot of money. We make our houses out of a box of graham crackers and homemade frosting.

First, make a batch of frosting.

1 lb. powdered sugar
3 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. vanilla
3 Tbsp. milk

Blend the butter and powdered sugar on low until combined. Add the vanilla and milk. If the frosting is thin and runny, add more powdered sugar. If it is too thick to work with, add a bit more milk.

For one house, I use 6 Graham crackers. They need a stable surface for transporting, so I use a piece of sturdy cardboard covered in aluminum foil. You could also use cookie sheets if you are willing to give them up for a few days.

Cover the edges of the first cracker in frosting, all the way around. Lay it on the foil. Place one cracker on each long side of the base, so that the cracker rests on the cardboard surface (not on top of the base cracker) and press the crackers against the frosted surface of the base cracker. You may need to add additional frosting onto the sides where they touch the base…it takes a thick coat!

Break the next cracker in half and position one half on each end, using the same method. Place some of the frosting in a ziploc bag and cut off one corner. Squeeze a line of frosting down each seam where one cracker joins another, both inside and outside of the house.

Squeeze a bead of frosting around the base cracker where it meets the aluminum foil as well, for extra stability.

Set the house aside for about an hour to harden, so that it is easier to apply the roof. I made four houses tonight. By the time I was done with the 4th, the frosting on the 1st was set so I could move right on to placing the roof.

Cover the top edge of the two long sides with frosting. Place a long graham cracker on each edge, leaning them toward one another so that they meet in the shape of a V. Squeeze a bead of frosting on the seam where the two crackers meet.

If your crackers aren’t crumbly, you could probably cut half a cracker in half again so that you’d have two triangles for the ends of the roof. Mine broke every time I tried it. Instead, I cut triangles out of a cardboard carton and covered the back with frosting, sticking that on to the roof. Pipe a bead of frosting around all the edges where the cardboard meets the cracker. Tomorrow this whole thing is going to be covered with frosting and candy, and no one need know that part of the roof was constructed out of cardboard!

Set the houses aside to dry. When you are ready to attach the candies, make another batch of frosting using the same recipe as above (I’ll probably double that recipe to have enough frosting for four kids). Give each child their own ziploc bag and a work station with a variety of candy. I went to a Farmer’s Market and bought a bunch of vintage candies. I’m so excited about tomorrow!

I’m hosting a blog carnival this month on Counter-Cultural Mom blog. This week’s Celebrating the Season topic is a chance to share what books and music you are using this Christmas. Do you have a new find to tell us about, or an old favorite you dust off every year?

We are using Family Worship for the Christmas Season by Ray Rhodes in our evening family devotions. There is a brief scripture passage for each day, a paragraph to bring out the key points for the parent leading devotions and a simple activity. What I am enjoying the most is the “Christmas Catechism” at the back of the book. Children are asked questions, catechism style, and in learning the answers they memorize much of Luke 2.

To see some of the other books we like for the Christmas season, click here.

In the meantime, our whole family has been sick, so we haven’t been doing much school worth writing about. And with Black Friday sales behind me and Christmas around the corner, I guess shopping is a bit on my brain.

My oldest has had the Trumark Slingshot for a few years and he loves it. He often takes it outside for target practice. One of our all-time favorite toys is the Three Man Slingshot. We love filling up a bucket full of water balloons and shooting them from the driveway into the backyard. You’d better make sure you have a lot of room, though, as this slingshot can launch a water balloon up to 150 yards!

We’ve made a tradition of giving our sons a sword when they turn 9 years old, to honor the fact that they are half-way grown. This is a special family celebration of sharing reasons why this boy is special, and giving him a charge to live wholly for the Lord. One of our sons has this William Wallace sword hanging on his wall, and he loves it. It is a constant reminder to him of courageous, honorable men who have gone before, and of his charge to become such a man.

What a boy reads will greatly influence who that boy becomes. It is critical that boys grow up on a diet of excellent literature which encourages courageous manhood, virtuous character and trust in God. We love the books of G.A. Henty and R. M. Ballantyne, and our boys do, too. Here are a few of Ballantyne’s (normally expensive) titles for 50% off this week. The Pirate City, The Dog Crusoe, and The Lonely Island are all on sale for $11 apiece.

We’ve used two enjoyable books in our history studies this year. Unwrapping the Pharaohs was a great addition to our study of Ancient Egypt. This book has scripture references throughout and helped us to integrate our study of the Pharaohs with a biblical timeline. The True Story of Noah’s Ark was recommended by our Tapestry of Grace curriculum this year. This beautifully illustrated book helped the boys to get an idea of the sheer magnitude of the ark.

Our boys have listened to all the stories in the Jonathan Park creation science radio drama. The absolutely love them. We don’t have the new Zoo and Aquarium guides, but they are on my boys’ wish list. This week the Jonathan Park Zoo guide CD set is on sale for $12.50, so that is a wish I may be able to fulfill!

Of course, there are many items for girls on sale, as well, but I don’t know much about those!