Recap: Christmas Activities (Dec. 7-23, 2008)

The two weeks before Christmas we went to the Freiburg Weinachtsmarkt, made lots of cookies, and tried our hands at plenty of Christmas crafts (thanks Mom S. and Lesley). So, we thought we would detail some of the highlights. First up, completely unrelated to Christmas - fingerpainting. Well, actually fingerpainting cleanup. The soupy pictures the kids made took a few days to dry on the wintergarten. Reese liked his sink bath:

Now on to the cookies. Check out the intense concentration from Reese. He is very proficient at dusting a Russian teacake with icing sugar:

Jodi saw a picture of Jolayne E.'s little girl Emma with a cute little craft that we had to copy. It was a hit and Erika enjoyed her fluffy big snowman:

At the Freiburg Christmas market, Heitzmann (the local bakery we spend half of my pay cheque at) had a booth set up and in the back you could pay three euros to decorate and bake gingerbread cookies. They did a really good job and Erika had so much fun. We really got our money's worth (no joke) with this one:

Reese enjoyed Erika's finished products (and he got a hat too):Erika really loved the foam gingerbread house that Lesley sent over. It was a really neat craft, although required a huge amount of patience and persistence on Jodi's part to get the thing to stand up, but the decorating was fun. It even had a musical pushbutton that played non-stop Jingle Bells thanks to Erika:

My Mom sent over a gingerbread house with all the candies and icing to decorate it. Jodi decided this year to just let the kids do what they wanted to do with the decorating:

Voila, the end product of a 3-year-old's imagination and the hands of a mother holding back the tides of two sugar-infused kids while trying to ice the house. The back side was Reese's, and it was equally as cute.

Jodi had an idea (or flashback) of a craft - the foam ball snowman. So, we brought out the pipecleaners and threw together some pretty handsome snowmen. Erika needed to have a backpack and purse on hers:

Reese didn't have any major requests for accessories, but, boy was he proud of his snow man:

You can see in the background in the above picture too that we hung some lights out on the wintergarten. I wanted to ducktape them everywhere but was constrained to the wintergarten windows only. Baby steps, next year the invasion begins...

Jodi and Jeff