In which I start a new Christmas tradition

I am in the process of decking our halls... as much as I wish this was the blog you were visiting to get awesome decorating ideas or holiday eye candy, I'm afraid it will again turn out to be the blog that you read to make yourself feel better. Last night we decorated the Christmas tree, which prompted me to quickly attempt to finish putting up the "real" every day decorations I've been hemming and hawing about. Several accidental holes in the wall later, I had a nice collection of framed pictures hanging up (I'll show you later), a trip to Home Depot for touch-up paint planned, things were properly dusted, and we were ready for our traditional "Christmas party." This is a tradition I've carried over from my own family - we all hang our ornaments together then sit on the couch eating home made sugar cookies (tons of sprinkles are a must here) and drinking hot apple cider. So. Christmas party: check. Next it was time to bust out my first awesome kids Christmas project.



If you've read my blog before perhaps you remember last year's failed kids Christmas project. Well, maybe that will be a new tradition around here. Every year mom sets up a dangerous activity for the kids to do in the name of Christmas and spends the rest of the day cleaning up the disaster that ensues. This project is pretty self-explanatory by the pictures. I bought a 6-pack of empty glass globes at the craft store, and we put buttons in them. Very cute - I saw it on Pinterest, in case you were wondering. As with last year's project, this was partially inspired by economics: I have a ton of buttons lying around and saw an opportunity for putting some of them to good use.



As cute as all these pictures are, however, they are still photos of young children gripping fragile glass orbs in their soft little hands. Nobody got cut, thank goodness, but as soon as we finished filling up our balls, Titus promptly dropped his on the kitchen floor, smashing invisible shards of glass everywhere. My dad was here, so he whisked the kids to safety while I sorted out buttons from pieces of glass, swept, vacuumed, swept again, and quickly filled up one of our spare empty globes with the buttons. Well, that's what I tried to do, but for some reason this new globe had a smaller opening in the top and wouldn't allow all of Titus' buttons inside. So, halfway through filling it up I decided to switch to the last empty globe, in the hope that its opening was big enough to fit all Titus' buttons. This meant that I needed to remove the almost-too-big buttons from the first replacement bulb (are you following this?), which proved to be a difficult task. Even the buttons I had managed to fit into the globe were now too large to fit back out of it. Of course my dad jumped at what he perceived as a heaven-sent chance to use the swiss army knife that has been collecting dust in his pocket, so he started to pry the buttons one by one out of the too-small globe with his handy portable tweezers. Halfway through this endeavor his gigantic hands squeezed the stupid ornament too hard, showering him and the kids in more invisible shards of glass. This clean up procedure was slightly more involved, but of course there was more vacuuming and sweeping. In the end we had 4 very nice looking button-filled ornaments, no injuries (how did that happen???) and another project on the not-really-for-kids list. Oh well. It's early in the month; maybe I can come up with something else. :)