Happy Christmas, from all 11 Collins' kids

Merry Christmas!!

From our house to yours!!

A Cobweb Christmas

We love our Catholic Mosaic book written by Cay Gibson. Amazon tells us, "A set of study guides for parents and teachers who wish to share Christmas-themed picture books with their children. 30 children's books are featured with discussion questions, vocabulary, and enrichment activities. Includes an extensive list of over 200 Christmas picture book titles, crafts, poems, and recipes."

We have been enjoying the books recommended in this book for many years.

And I always seem to have a new group of littles to enjoy the books and activities with.

The books we enjoyed over the last few days were: The Cobweb Curtain

The Christmas Cobwebs and

Cobweb Christmas:The Tradition of Tinsel.

All the stories incorporated the ideas of the goodness of spiders and how they helped the baby Jesus or helped those who helped celebrade Jesus' childhood.

 I  found a great printout for a spider snowflake.

We very carefully cut out our spiders and when we unfolded them we were so happy to find beautiful paper spiderwebs, 

It take a lot of finger muscles to cut out the paper which was folder many times.



Success!!

We glued our finished spiders onto black constructions paper. We then used out finger to spread on glitter glue.  

We found a great print  of our spider that we made into Christmas snowflake.

Some to the spiders and a couple of the wonderful  books

Now, I am one to catch the spider and put it outside to "be with it's family" 

I was so happy to find the simple craft to make a spider suitable to every Christmas tree.The simple dirctions for making a jingle bell spider craft can be found here..they are very cute. 

I'm getting up there....

 My family prepared a wonderful celebration for my birthday....

complete with enough candle to warn the family!

Homemade Orange Pomander

 We haven't made orange pomanders in a few years...and I just love the Christmassy  smell these give off-it's one of my favorite smells. 

Start with a good sized navel orange and whole cloves.  Hopefully you can find a nice Amish store to pick up the cloves, because if not this is a VERY expensive craft.  At Walmart I priced the whole cloves at almost $12.00 a jar. 

 Stick the cloves into the orange.  We like to use a toothpick to  make a little whole in the orange skin and then the clove slides in nice and easy.

 The kids took a couple days of completing their oranges...it's kind of boring work after a little while, so it is a great thing to do while watching a a Christmas movie.

 Once completed..(or as completed as the kids can manage) wrap the orange with pretty netting.  I found this red netting at Hobby Lobby.  It has nice large openings to let the yummy smell through.

I then tied a ribbon tightly around the ribbon. 

At the same time I was putting the ribbon around the netting I strung a piece of ribbon for hanging the pomander.

Picture perfect!

I then hung the oranges in our front windows.  It's gorgeous in our window in front of our many paper snowflakes. 

Merry Christmas everyone!

Time is running out to order your hats and mittens before Christmas

 There's still 2 weeks to get your orders in to be ready for Christmas.

We have earflap hats with or without braids and with or without a pom pom.  

Adult sized hats are $20.00 

Kids hats $15.00

 Baby hat $15.00

 Tiny knitted  stocking ornaments $5.00 a pair....I'll do my best to get what ever color you are interested in. 

 Adult hats:$20.00

adult mittens: $10.00

kids mittens: $7.50

Candy Cane Wreath

 I saw many different varieties of candy cane wreaths around pinterest...so I pulled my favorite parts of different wreaths together to make one all our own. 

First Kimberly painted an old cd with red acrylic paint....

 while the paint was wet, toss on the glitter...a lot of glitter.  After the paint and glitter dried I sprayed the whole cd with Spray Acrylic Sealer to keep all the glitter in one place.

 I used 18 candy canes for our wreath. 

I used the glue gun to make pairs of candy canes.  

 Testing out the look.

  Below you can see that I added green ribbon to each pair of candy canes. I also used the glue gun for this. After the ribbons were added, I placed the candy canes into the wreath shape and glued the tops and bottoms together.  It is still pretty floppy at this point.  

I then used a lot of glue around the circular center of the wreath and placed the glittery cd in place.

This made it much more stable.

I added a pretty bow in to the center of of the wreath and green ribbon for hanging.

We are all very happy with this years wreath. 

The Day of Preparation

 Today it was all hands on deck!!

Time to get ready for Thanksgiving dinner and Grandma and Grandpa's house.

Luke made the pumpkin bread.

 Laura's first apple pie.

 Gracie made the pumpkin pie. 

 A beautiful centerpiece from our neighbor. (I love this idea for the vase)

 Daddy and Kim used her BabyCakes machine to make cake balls.

 Kimmy made very cute pilgrim hats.....

 all by herself!

 Gracie with her pies and pretzel and M&M dots.

 Laura made us very yummy caramel corn.

We are almost ready for Thanksgiving.

For full disclosure...we told the kids to eat cereal for dinner tonight.