advent activities: week three
December 20th, 2013
I probably won’t be back until after the holidays. I may pop in next Friday with our last (half) week of activities, even if it’s only so I can remember what we did :) I hope all of your last minute scrambling isn’t making you crazy. Even if everything doesn’t get crossed off your massive to do list, do have a wonderful holiday!
advent activities: week three
DAY 13: watch Polar Express
Friday is our movie night, but this one turned out to be a little too scary for the younger ones. It ended up being just my daughter and me snuggled on the couch watching a movie. We both cried, of course.
DAY 14: drink egg nog.
It was a busy run around kind of day and we needed to sneak an advent activity in quick.
DAY 15: wrap caramels
Every year I make caramels for christmas presents. Making them is the easy part. Wrapping 400 caramels is the hard part. Thankfully my family doesn’t mind helping. Actually, my daughter says wrapping caramels is her favorite part of christmas! This year I decided to make it even harder by putting a bit of washi tape on each caramel. I also made a handy dandy key, so everyone can decode the flavors before they rip into the caramels.
DAY 16: make marshmallows
This sounds super ambitious, but it’s actually super easy and surprisingly fast. We made this recipe + peppermint extract + fancy swirls. We made it two times and ended up with about 250 marshmallows. Somehow just enough for all three of my kids’ classes. 5 for each classmate, packed up a pretty bag:
Not a bad gift if I do say so myself. And wow! homemade marshmallows are delicious!
DAY 17: sledding!
It started out well enough: beautiful day! fluffy snow! not too cold! But it ended with one kid slamming head first into a metal box, one getting whacked in the face with a flying sled, and last but not least one rather epic bloody nose. Oh well, we’ll live to sled another day.
DAY 18: coloring these cheapie wooden christmasy things I seem to get every year.
We need something safe and quiet after our sledding fiasco. I pick up these coloring do-dads every year as an emergency advent activity. Now it seems they’ve become a tradition.
DAY 19: crack nuts
The advent calendar may as well have said “vacuum.” Still there is something old fashioned and christmassy about cracking nuts. I’m happy to say the kids loved it as much as I do.
I hope you all have a lovely holiday, or at the very least a nap on the couch! Merry Christmas!
vacuum, LOL
love love love this! I’m hoping to make some marshmallows and caramels. We’ll see. ha, your sledding outing sounds like about how ours would be. thanks for keeping it real. And those wood ornaments! I love getting those too!
Oh boy my four year old LOVES marshmallows!!!! We’ll make these tomorrow
Do you have the recipe for the carmels?
Wow I love this. Great post. I decided to do a advent this year half filled with activities / half filled with stuff. Next year I think I’d experiment with all activities. Kids don’t need more stuff! Thanks for the insp.
Thanks for sharing! The vacuuming–LOL! Enjoy your holidays!
I’ve got a recipe for marshmallows that I need to try. It was supposed to happen this week but I forgot to buy gelatin. We just grabbed some of those balsa coloring things. Dollar to joanns. Minutes of fun! And open capped markers found laying on my couch. This is why we don’t give them markers
I’d long forgotten, but my family had a wooden nut bowl with nutcracker and some picker tool. I remember winter evenings with my parent cracking walnuts, hazelnuts, almond, Brazil nuts. So beautiful all the shapes and colors
Marshmallows are one of my favorite things about winter ;)