December is always a dark month here in Washington, but it is also always so delightful! I love the traditions of December and the holidays and I love delighting in my children, the twinkling lights and decorations, and the birth of our Lord and Savior. What a delightful and busy month December is.
The first weekend in December I went to a women's conference with some women from my church. It was a Friday night and Saturday morning so we spent the night over there. It was a really nice conference and I enjoyed the speakers story telling and thinking about studying the Bible in a new way. It was fun to spend time with friends as well.
When Aubrey gets a crazy idea and does this! Lol!
The youth had a reward offered to them for doing their homework and other things for Wednesday night fellowship. Two of my girls (Aubrey and Olivia) won the award of getting to "decorate" their leaders. These 5 girls who won were ruthless! It got a little wild and honestly quite gross. It looked and smelled a lot like puke. Yuck!! They all had fun though. The one trick that back fired was that Ryan hard boiled some of the eggs. The kids did not know it though so they smacked them very hard on the leaders heads which really hurt. I don't know that the leaders will volunteer for this reward again any time soon.
We had to have a 3rd memorial service in December for Mr. Culpovich. It turned out really nice as always. Ryan did the service as Mark was out of town. I did all the food and made flowers for the table. They turned out really cute!
Amaryllis, cozy winter days, lights, snow! All things I love about December!
We were able to go with our co-op to the Pacific Northwest Ballet Nutcracker. Our first time to get to watch the PNB. It was really amazing, but we were way up there!! It was a bit hard to see, but still very fun to watch. The production was very amazing! I would like to go again someday and have better seats!
The teen girls had a fun idea of having a chacuterie board dinner party in their pajamas followed by a movie! Each girls volunteered to bring a board and it turned out so so cute and so so yummy! Seriously, just looking at these pictures is making me want to have another one of these parties! They had so much food they decided to let the younger sisters stay and eat and of course Hans and I were able to eat too. Then I took the younger girls to the Griesemer house and then Hans and I watched a show upstairs while the girls watched their movie downstairs.
I researched chacuterie boards way too much! LOL! I really wanted to do a fun dessert board with this frosting snowman. The pinterest one looked better than mine, but it was yummy. We didn't have a lot of treats that would dip in it though because Kelsey brought the really cute dessert tray.
I am the fellowship leader at our church so I came up with this fun idea for a Christmas party last year and it turned out really fun. We had an ugly sock contest with a white elephant gift exchange. Everyone brought some appetizers and desserts to share. I also did some fun guessing jars at the beginning of the night as well as a get to know you bingo game so everyone had something to do while the judging and eating was going on. Then we had a different white elephant gift exchange where you rolled dice to figure out what to do with the gift, pass, exchange, open etc. I had never done it that way, but we had two groups and it worked out really well and made it more fair yet completely chance as to what people ended up with.
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| The church's Christmas tree this year |
Here are some pictures from the white elephant gift exchange.
And few of my family sock pics. I only really had Hans, Raelyn and Olivia in on the fun. Hopefully next year, my kids will want to be more involved!
And finally here are the winners from the night. We had 5 categories and 4 judges I think ended up choosing these guys! Four out of the five are from on "family" that worked together to make their socks.
A favorite tradition of the girls each year is to make gingerbread houses. I buy the pre-built houses at Costco and they have so much fun decorating them. This year the frosting was not working well so I made up a royal frosting and it worked so much better. The girls spent a lot of time and did such great work on their houses they turned out really cute!
Aubrey's is the only one that got her extra roof to work. Hers turned out really cute!
Raelyn worked so hard on hers and her hard work paid off. She had a really cute little house!
The lights in front of our house turned out nice this year too!
Another favorite Christmas tradition is to frost sugar cookies. This year we had left over royal frosting from the ginger bread houses so we just frosted with that to start with. The girls did a great job as always decorating the cookies and being really creative with them.
That same night we did some caroling with our church. That was so fun and so cold!! We had a nice time though and think blessed a few of the people that were in the neighborhood where we sang.
Here are some pictures of the finished the cookies...they turned out so cute! And tasted so yummy!
Another favorite holiday tradition is working on puzzles. Before we even got to Christmas and our new puzzle Hans and some of the girls put together this old puzzle we had from a few years back. This puzzle was finished on Christmas Adam.
I always get a puzzle or two for the girls for Christmas Adam and this year I got them two. I'm not sure what the second one was and if we ever did it. But the one was finished by the next day on Christmas Eve.
Oliver really loved these lights on his neck you can tell! LOL!
Christmas Eve is our favorite! I just love celebrating the birth of our Savior. This year Christmas Eve was on a Sunday so we went to church in the morning and then we had a candle light service that night. I was so impressed by our amazing Pastors putting on music and services 2 times in one day. I felt blessed by them.
And of course my favorite thing is seeing my family worshipping God with their faces all a glow in candlelight!
This is our friend Daniel and he had made Santa hats for all of his birds on his shirt. I thought it was pretty funny!
Back at home I had to have a picture of our pretty tree!
And of course even more so I wanted picture of each of my girls in front of the tree. These girls are just so beautiful inside and out!
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| I just love our little family! |
This was our yummy dessert! White chocolate raspberry cheesecake!
And of course the night would not be complete unless we opened our one present on Christmas Eve.
Christmas morning!
We always open our stockings first!
After breakfast, we open the rest of our presents. We all got some fun things this year, mostly the girls. But I got some fun things from Olivia as did Hans. I sure feel blessed to have these girls and have the provision to buy fun gifts. Here are some pictures from our morning. And my favorite part is what the girls get for their sisters.
The rest of the day was cooking dinner and the kids playing spikeball with Hans in the garage. It was a fun and relaxing day.
On Tuesday, Mary and Eric came over from Anna's house to visit us for the night. We had a great time with them and then the next day took them to an ice skating in Bremerton with a bunch of friends from our church. Here are some pictures from our fun time on the ice. Well the kids went skating...the adults just hung out. Love all these kids from our church!! They are truly our family! After getting back from ice skating Mary and Eric headed back to Anna's house.
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| With skates on Jodie is as tall as me! |
The next day, Thursday, we headed over to Anna's house to spend some time with the family. We decided to go bowling and it was really fun. It was great to get to spend some time with Anna, the boys, and Mary and Eric.
The final score! Everyone did so great!
After bowling we went back to Anna's for some dinner followed by s'more making! It was short, but nice to have some time together over the holidays.
The next night we were invited for an impromptu dinner at Mills house around the campfire. Claire had been at a birthday party for Michelle in the afternoon so she came with her. It was chilly, but fun to have some good conversation around the fire.
A December 30th rainbow! Not sure what else we did that day.
The next day was December 31st and a Sunday! The last day of 2023. Here is Raelyn and I in front of the Christmas tree Sunday morning.
And the Griesemer girls came over after church to hang out. The girls filmed Rapunzel that day I believe. I think it turned out really cute!
And that night at church we had a New Year's eve party with a potluck and games followed by a countdown and noise makers at 9 pm. Always a fun time!
After the church party was cleaned up and over we headed to our house with a bunch of people for an after party till midnight celebration! It ended up being way more people than I thought it would be, but it was really fun and worth it. Here are some pictures from the night.
This shows just a bit of the glitter that was on the floor! There was so much glitter from the poppers that I had bought. It took us awhile to get it all cleaned up!
