Merry Christmas

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We went to the ROM and checked out the reopened dinosaur exhibit, but to be honest, Nefarious far prefers the mummies… I think other than the play area and the bat cave, that’s her favorite. Anyway, I forgot to post our gingerbread house — the construction went perfectly, although I do admit that it rapidly degenerated into what’s basically just a platform to hold an enormous amount of candy in a thick layer of icing…

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For our Christmas tree, instead of setting up a 3D tree, we painted a six foot high tree on a discarded canvas (Caitlin’s idea), and then made lots of decorations and glued them to it. I think Santa will be quite pleased — it may not look as “fancy” as a normal tree but it’s a much more fun family activity I think.

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Other than that, loads of ice skating, sledding, and other winter holiday fun is being had.

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13 Responses to “Merry Christmas”

  1. ed Says:

    May you have a fun and enjoyable holiday! The canvas tree looks COOL!

  2. Sitara Says:

    Merry Christmas – I hope you all have a great day =)

  3. ELY M. Says:

    very tasty house, I want to eat it :D

  4. hedvig Says:

    merry christmas!
    very cute tree :)

  5. Wldfire_1 Says:

    Merry Christmas to you all Shannon!! I wish you all the very best!

  6. hitonihi' Says:

    I love the tree! Happy holidays :)

  7. Joan Says:

    I adore the tree idea, it looks great and involves Ari in the decorating more then a regular tree. Very cool idea Caitlin..
    Merry X-mas to all three of you. Have a wonderful family holiday..

  8. cirrin Says:

    Last year money was tight and I didn’t want to spend money on buying a tree so I had my girls make a tree out of construction paper. They had a lot of fun designing the tree itself and then creating paper ornaments for it. My older even made a tiny angel for the top.

  9. Shannon Says:

    Cirrin – I was thinking about something similar too, maybe finding a few branches in the park and building a bit newspaper tree around it.

  10. estrojenn Says:

    i have friends who are hardcore environmentalists (and artists) – they reuse everything…they made their ‘tree’ out of the green plastic tubs that strawberries come in. they put a light in the middle and decorated it with things they made as a family. it was incredibly beautiful.

    and it had so much more meaning than going out and chopping a tree down…and i feel the same about your painted tree. if i ever have children i really want to make sure that i do things like this with them…those are the memories that stay with them for the rest of their lives.

  11. Phil Says:

    Great tree idea – much more ‘cat friendly’ than a real tree! Hope you had a good Christmas.

  12. Melissa Says:

    ah your house came out FAR better than mine..and we had 5 college kids trying to put it togeather

    great job :)

  13. Cami Says:

    Man, your family is awesome. I wish the rest of my family was artistic. If/when I have kids, I hope my family will be so creative. I pretty much agree with estrojenn.

    You have some seriously good ideas. And your daughter is lucky to have such adventurous parents =] Congratulations, haha. =]

    And keep it up!

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