The last week of July is always Christmas in our family. I love Christmas. I have these great memories of all of the things that we did to prepare for the holiday when I was little. I have not really come close to recreating what my mom did for us, so maybe I can make up for that by celebrating Christmas twice a year.
During Christmas in July we do a Christmas craft/cooking activity every day, listen to Christmas music obsessively and watch a Christmas movie or special every day.
We also have special Christmas-decorated breakfasts each day. Which usually means that I let the kids pour Christmas colored sprinkles on their oatmeal in the morning.
This year we made paper Christmas trees, which provided a great opportunity to work on shapes and cutting with Ephram. For Charlie it was so nice to see his autonomy. He required zero help from me and was so proud to show me what he had done and why once he was finished.
Our other craft this year was snowflakes. Charlie had never cut snowflakes before. The folding part was a little tough for him, so I sat and folded up 20 pieces of paper while he was cutting. I even got to do a few myself. There's something about making snowflakes that is undeniably fun. A few of Charlie's got hacked up so much that they were no longer snowflakes, but overall his turned out great! Ephram couldn't muscle through all of the folds to cut the paper. Instead he took all of our scraps and did his favorite activity... poured Elmer's glue on various pieces of construction paper to make collages. Everyone had a lot of fun with this - we were at it for more than 2 hours!
Then we hung everything up on the back doors so that it would look a little bit like Christmas in the house.
We also made sugar cookies. The kids were great helpers making the dough. Yes, I have a KitchenAid stand mixer. But I think it is more fun for the kids to make dough the old fashioned way, so that's how we do it when the kids are around.
The next day we rolled out the dough and cut out the cookies. Ephram had never done this before... he had so much fun playing with the roller and placing the cookie cutters. I was really impressed with his skill, I think it comes from all of the play dough time. Charlie had fun putting sprinkles on the cookies before they went into the oven. I think the most funny part about this day was that Ephram thought the flour on the board we used to roll out the dough was so very delicious. He was getting his fingers wet, covering them in flour, and then licking it off. (Once he started doing this I stopped rolling dough on that part of the board!) At the very end I gave both him and Charlie a small bit of cookie dough to eat. Ephram took one taste and spit it out. I guess flour is better than dough!
Over the course of the week I let the kids choose out our Christmas movies from our DVD shelves. We watched: The Mickey Mouse Christmas Carol (twice), Elf, The Santa Clause, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Polar Express and The Santa Clause 2. (I was personally wishing we could just keep on watching every last one of them!)
On the very last day of the week we gave the kids each a present to open. They were very excited to each find a new book. Ephram got his first "big boy" book -
Harold and the Purple Crayon. Charlie got his first chapter books -
The Magic Treehouse (1-4). Macie got a super cute book called
On the Night You Were Born.
When I told the boys that there was a surprise waiting where they each sleep, they were super excited. We had wrapped another set of books for each of them by their beds... and we had one very big surprise waiting for our two year old...
