As you are doing your after Christmas sale shopping don’t forget to think ahead! Check out this post from last year, from Katrina, about what to do with clearance candy!
Last year I found amazing large tins for 10 cents each!! I did not even care about the mix that was inside of them. Super cute containers, decorations for next year, and gifts for this year can be bought for so cheap right now. So many things can easily be repurposed without the Christmas theme on them!
Rebecca
Image from No Longer Quivering.
I am busy spending time with my children, baking, cooking, and just having a wonderful Holiday with family! I hope the same for all of you!
Merry Christmas!
Happy Holidays!
Rebecca
Can you guess what I made these beautiful tiny trees out of?
Party Hats and Birthday Streamers! I kid you not! I wanted to add some new decorations to our décor, without spending a dime.
I just so happened to have some party hats that I have had for YEARS. At the last party the elastic (that keeps them on your head) got used to make sling shots (really great slingshots and bow and arrows! They even worked! Sometimes my children are so ingenious!).
I saw them doing it, and didn’t mind because we had had these hats for so long. I don’t know, however, why I saved the darn hats, but I did.
This is one that the kids decorated with a pipe cleaner garland and gem stickers!
I have to tell you I had a few fails at first. I knew I wanted to cover them with tissue squares. You know how you did it as a kid: Take a small tissue square and wrap it around the end of an unsharpened pencil, dip the tissue end into glue, stick it onto your paper, pull your pencil out, and wha-la!
I did not have any red or green tissue paper. So, I tried using thin Christmas Scrapbook paper. Then I tried a few more supplies until I stumbled upon the perfect material!
Streamers! I love the texture the streamers gave this, even more than if I had had tissue paper! However, be ready to cut a TON of squares for each tree. Then, cut triple that amount! No kidding.
Another disclosure is that because I used party hats it was hard to get the squares to stay on. Party hats are quite smooth texture and squares will easily slip off. So we would just add some squares haphazardly around the hat. Then, let them dry. Once the glue dries they stay on really well. Then, we come back and fill in. Repeat this step a bunch.
Could be a fun craft to keep your kids busy while you are hiding away in a bedroom, wrapping presents…or busy baking and cooking!
Rebecca
What a whirl wind night trying to get teacher gifts ready. I think they turned out fun.
They are filled with all the goodies we’ve been baking this week!
Now I’m off to the Jingle Bell Jog at school!
Rebecca
My family is huge on traditions! One thing that we love to celebrate, especially at the holidays, are traditions from Scandinavia because we have family that came from Denmark. Making Aebleskiver is one of my favorite traditions from Scandinavia. Aebleskiver is basically a pancake ball, only much yummier! 
This is the recipe that our whole family uses. I love having recipe cards or books that have writing in them and you can see that they are well worn by the stains from foods as your loved ones have made the recipe using it! This one is fantastic because you can see my Dad’s conversions to double and quadruple the recipe. Aebleskiver goes fast when we make it because we all love it, and there are a lot of us. So we always quadruple it!!
You will need an aebleskiver pan to make this. My parents were nice enough to gift each of their children with one of these pans as we moved out on our own!
Here is how I make Aebleskiver:
Ingredients
1/2 C butter, melted 2tsp Baking Powder
3 eggs, separated 1/2 tsp Salt
1 C Milk 1/2 tsp Cardamom
2 TBL Sugar Powdered Sugar
1 1/2 C Flour Butter for Pan
1. In a large bowl, blend 1/2 cup melted butter, egg yolks, milk and sugar. (blue bowl)
2. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and cardamom, if desired. (green bowl)
3. Stir into egg-yolk mixture.
4. In a clean medium bowl, beat egg whites until stiff but not dry.
5. Fold into flour mixture.
6. Heat aebleskiver pan over medium-low heat until a drop of water sizzles when dropped into pan.
7. Spoon 1/2 tsp butter into each cup; let melt.
8. Spoon 1 rounded TBL batter into each cup. Cook about 1 minute on each side, using a knitting needle or long wooden skewer to turn balls. (This is where I use a fork, as above!)
If heat is too high, centers will be doughy. This picture shows 4 aebleskiver that have been turned and three that have not yet. I filled these ones a little full it looks like! 
8. Dust each with powdered sugar. Serve hot. Makes 20 pancake balls.
FYI we don't use a knitting needle or skewer. We use two forks to turn the aebleskiver over. Also I never have cardamom on hand so I never add it.
Here is my Dad filling up some aebleskiver with jelly! My Dad is usually the one to make aebleskiver. He is also the one we gather around to hear wonderful stories about Denmark!
I have some aebleskiver on hand right now and now have a serious craving to go and finish them off!
I’d love to hear what fun traditions everyone else celebrates from other countries!
Rebecca…nom nom nom…
Usually my eggshells go straight into my compost. But this is a fun way to reuse them as well!
I love the great number of Christmas pictures that you can download free off of the internet. I like to try and have the kids decorate them differently each time. We’ve colored (with markers, pencils, crayons, etc) painted, melted crayon, glued yarn on, used tissue paper, etc.
I thought I’d try something new this time. So I boiled some eggshells (that I cleaned out) with green food coloring and some in red food coloring. I used lots of dye because I wanted red, not pink!
Here are some of our colored eggshell masterpieces. This was really fun for the kids because they got to smash up their own eggshells. We just covered the pictures with glue and then sprinkled the eggshells on top. We did the red berry first, then the green leaves.
Rebecca
Busy busy busy! But I thought you might like to see this stocking that I made. Yes, homemade stockings take time. But they are so worth it! I really love this stocking. It took me soooo many hours to cross stitch this thing, but totally worth it!
I’m curious what everyone’s traditions are when it comes to stockings. Homemade or store bought? Big or little? Do you put an orange in the toe? What else do you fill it, when do you open them?
Look at the fun details on this thing!
And the ca-ute creatures are to die for!
What kinds of stockings do you have? We actually have 3 sets…don’t ask.
One my Mom fills for all of her kids and grandkids for Christmas Eve. Last year I took those cheap red stockings and embroidered all of our names on them. Then, we have the handmade ones.
Rebecca
St. Lucia’s Day is a mostly Scandinavian holiday. Though St. Lucia was actually Italian. We have Danish ancestry so we love celebrating Scandinavian things to help us remember our roots. I love the thought that in Denmark they started celebrating this holiday to bring light in a time of darkness, in 1944. This was a protest to the German occupation! Danish history during that time is fantastic! You should read about how the tiny country of Denmark banded together to protect their people. They did not see Danish Jews as anything other than Danes! AMAZING!!
The above picture was one of our star boys in our St. Lucia’s Day procession last year. In traditional St. Lucia’s Day parades you carry an actual candle, this was our safe version!
The holiday tradition is to have a parade where one unmarried girl gets chosen to wear a crown of candles and comes bearing saffron buns. The children in the procession all wear white with a red sash.
In our version we sing the traditional Danish song and some boys even wear a Nisse Cap (the red one in the picture, not the blue sesame street cap worn by my teenage nephew!).
Papa (my Father) goes along with our procession to help the children sing the song (they have written versions they are reading from in the picture above). We get together with my siblings and all my Nephews to do this at my Mom and Dad’s house. These pictures were from our St. Lucia’s Day festivities last year. We are all gearing up for our celebration today after the kids get out of school! I have the only girls in the family so my oldest daughter always gets to be our St. Lucia girl!
I hope you might try some version of this to help your kids learn about other cultures. I always loved learning about how other countries celebrate Christmas!
What traditions do you have that are from other countries? I’d love to hear about them or even give me a link!
Rebecca
Need something different for gifts? These would be fun as package toppers (of course with your kids photos in them first!)! These were made with polymer clay. I left them open at the top or side to allow a picture to slide into them! My favorite is the red one with the cute mistletoe and holly on it!
Another version is to use paper ornaments that I cut out. These were actually the patterns that I used on my polymer clay ornaments!
My kids made some of their own photo ornaments and here are some of those plain foam embellishments that my kids glammed up to use on them!
I made all of these last year for a Christmas in July we did here. Here is the whole post!
Rebecca
What fun things are you brewing up? Feel free to add a link in your comments, if you have a post showing what you have been doing! We are working on gifts for others. I love crafting with my kids!
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