More Advent: Week 2

Our second week of Advent could have the subtitle "Creating,"  as we did a lot of making, creating, and preparing around here.

First order of business this week: St. Nicholas!  The homeschool group had our St. Nicholas party, and it went so well.  I helped organize it with two other members of the group, and it turned out exactly as we had planned.  First, the kids watched a short movie about St. Nicholas, for which they sat amazingly still!  Then, we had them make a special project to promote Nicholas' spirit of "random acts of kindness."  Instead of the children getting treat bags to take home from the party, they made treat bags to leave on the doorsteps of strangers on the eve of St. Nicholas' feast day.  In the bag we included a laminated card with Nicholas' picture on one side, and the following words on the other side:

I performed this random act of kindness in the spirit of Saint Nicholas.  Please consider spreading the spirit by performing your own act of kindness and then leaving this card for the recipient of your act.

Then the kids had a snack and played St. Nicholas Symbol bingo with cards we had made based on the St. Nicholas Center website's cards.  That night, which also happened to be the night of our town's Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony, Caeley was so excited to drop her special bag of treats on a doorstep!  We had a wonderful evening with friends, a hay ride through town, Christmas music, a live nativity, and cheer enough to make it the most memorable St. Nick's Eve ever!

Oh Tannenbaum...

This looked a lot prettier in real life!

Let's go for a hay ride, a wonderful hay ride...

This week, we also began to work on the Advent puzzle.  I admit it.  I stole this idea from our house-mate Matt, whose family would do a Christmas puzzle every year together.  I loved the idea so much, and since last year we've been doing an "Advent" puzzle.  For me, it's really nice to see a puzzle unfold, and all the pieces come together, literally, the way Advent is supposed to unfold, little by little, as we approach Christmas.  I've been super impressed that Ailin has not really been a problem (the puzzle IS on the coffee table after all!) and has only knocked a small piece off once during a spat of "almost two" rebellion.

The puzzle B.K.  (Before Ken started working on it.)

The puzzle after B.K.  (You can tell who the puzzle-master is in this house!)

As our puzzle is growing, so too is our Jesse Tree.  Each day we feel it:  We're getting closer.  (Side note:  Is it me or does the Old Testament seem to go on forever with its mess of humanity just waiting for Jesus to come and put things right???  Or perhaps I'm jaded by the length of time my Bible study has spent on Genesis...????!!!)

We've started a minimal amount of baking because my freezer space is limited right now by a huge turkey. I've made Russian Tea Cakes (aka Mexican Wedding Cakes) for our "Christmas Around the World" stop in Russia, a Martha Stewart chocolate/peppermint thumbprint cookie (which I totally modified and butchered), and chocolate chip flax seed cookies.  I won't point fingers, but someone has eaten nearly half the chocolate chip cookies.  We will jump more fully into baking next week, assuming I can eat enough other stuff out of the freezers to make room!

Note to self: just don't modify recipes.  These tasted okay, but the chocolate center was supposed to be melted chocolate chips with peppermint flavoring, and I decided to melt down Hershey's Peppermint Kisses, which don't melt well at all...

Oh. Dear.

Also for our C.A.T.W. Russia stop, we decided to paint Russian Nesting Dolls.  Since it's Advent, we decided to paint them to resemble nativity figures.  I thought it would be a complicated job, taking weeks between paint drying, design, etc.  Turns out that wood soaks up the acrylic paint beautifully, and that they are not as hard as they look.  Granted, I didn't shower or cook dinner the day we made these, but I guess those are the sacrifices we make.  I don't tend to be a very "crafty" person, and certainly not as a homeschooler, but it felt very refreshing and spirit-lifting to work on something so fun and pretty even though I could've been doing a million other things.  (Remember the laundry pile?)  It made me realize how much I would love to spend more time creating things of beauty...whether it's getting back into cross-stitching or learning some other useful skill.  It just made me happy.

Joseph, Mary and Jesus, a King, a Shepherd, and an Angel (wings on the back...)  I love that all of them fit inside the loving protection of Joseph...

And yesterday, the Saturday before Gaudete Sunday, we hunted for and cut down our Christmas tree.  It might look all idyllic in the pictures, but it was COLD, Ailin was strapped to my back crying because the wind kept blowing her hood off, and Ken kept rejecting every tree we picked.  In the end, it worked out, and the big girls had fun getting free cider at the stand afterwards.  I'm so excited for the decorating that will begin in earnest during the third week of Advent.