Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Jason, Heather and Brennan

A Last Minute Christmas Project

So all over the internet this month, (well, the parts of the internet I frequent anyway) I have been seeing (and loving) these waterless snowglobes that people have been making inspired by some at Anthropologie.


{image source: anthopologie}

How cute and easy!  All along I had planned on waiting and recreating these next year...

...but then as I was switching over laundry this morning, Brennan being his normal curious self decided to open up a box that was stashed in the corner.

And lo and behold, a bunch of these were in there. (Obviously, long forgotten about by me.  I once upon a time had intentions to actually can something with them. Ahem.)



I took that as a sign. : )  Let's make some snowglobes!

Time to gather some supplies.  We didn't put up our Christmas village this year, so I dug out the box of village trees and the fake snow.  Brennan wasted no time in doing some forest management.



I also raided Brennan's stash of plastic animals to see if any of them could become part of our display, but none of the ones I found seemed appropriate to be joyously frolicking in the wintery forest.



It actually kind of looked like Lassie and John Boy had rounded up some Christmas dinner candidates. ha.  I'll stick with the trees.

After I had all my goods in line, I selected a variety of trees and hot glued them inside the lids.



Next I enlisted my little helper to funnel some snow into the jars.



We had to use a bamboo skewer to make the snow go down.



Kudos to me for realizing how much of a mess this would be and using a tray to catch the extra. : )



Our jars had a little too much snow.  The little trees look like they were buried in a blizzard.  Of course I kept them that way. :)  But if you do this, just use a little, especially if your jars are small like ours.

Time for a test shake.



Add the rest of the forest.



And the fences Brennan insisted on. (Because they're friends.)



Ta-da!  You have a magical and  wintery centerpiece in less that 20 minutes.

Snowflakes

It snowed earlier this week.





We've had lots of fun cutting out paper snowflakes.









Brennan had a great time painting and glittering some macaroni snowflakes.





I think they turned out so cute.



We made some tasty treats...



...and some of them were snowflakes. : )



I had my yearly bokeh creating session with our Christmas tree.







And added a snowflake ornament for fun.







Have a wonderful weekend!

Yesterday...

Jason reenlisted for another 5 years!



Congratulations, Honey!  We are so proud of you.



I can't wait to see what adventures the next 5 years will bring.



xoxo,

Walking in a Christmas Wonderland

My first thought was to be all original and use the title "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," but that implies snow, and there was none.  Frigidly COLD, yes, but no snow.

It is snowing as I am typing this though.  Last night the weather guy said not to expect snow until Friday, but here it is this morning.  Hopefully it sticks around 'til Christmas.  Why live in Utah if you can't have a white Christmas?  Last year it snowed early, melted, and then snowed the day after (and then stuck around until May)!

But that's enough about snow today.  I'm sure I will be posting more about that later this week. : )

As I mentioned yesterday, we spent Saturday evening in downtown Ogden walking around and checking out the Christmas displays.  They go all out!  There is an entire village set up just for Christmas, all lit up, most of them with additional special animations.

(Santa is there in his castle too, but since we already checked that goody off our to-do list, we were able to skip waiting in that humongous line.)

It was hard to choose which pictures to share, so as usual I'll go with the more is better approach.  ; )

First of all...why looky here, I even got into a picture this time!



I always wonder how many people, and how long it takes, to put up all these lights.



Last year we pushed Brennan in his stroller so he didn't get to see everything up close.  He was in awe looking in all the windows.















So much to see!







I tried to take a picture of the moon.



I better just stick with the lights. : )



I see they used the Griswold method to attach their lights. : )



Lots of tiny moving displays.  For the people back in my old neighborhood, it reminded me of the inside displays at Holiday World.  I used to love those.  It's been a lot of years since I've been, are they still there?



















Thank goodness for hot chocolate.



I don't know why we don't go downtown more often.  Even when there's nothing going on, there's all kinds of cool shops and old buildings to see.  This one was vacant, and the windows broken out.  I wonder what it used to be?  I think it just needs some love.





After we headed home and we finally defrosted, we all decided we were a little hungry.  Jason got a pizza, and Brennan and I had some of these.



The perfect end to a great day. :)