Farewell to the Holidays

The saddest day of the holidays is doubtlessly the day we pack all our holiday decorations up and say goodbye until next year. The house is clean, but it's no longer festive. Here's Mam saying a fond farewell to our cheerful little snowman.And here is Skimble, our wizard of a cat, enjoying watching Daddy put the tree lights away...or enjoying flickering blinky things on the wall, at least.Bleh. Taking down the decorations means getting back into the school routine. I wasn't ready. The holidays were really fun this year...at least as soon as Christmas arrived and there were new toys an a lot less wound-up anticipation. School means fixing lunches every night, getting out of bed in the morning and not showering as often as I'd really like to. But a couple days and a wee bit less sanity later and I'd changed my mind. I couldn't wait to have the house to myself for a few seconds.

Fortunately, putting the Christmas decorations away also means there's no decorative use for a gingerbread house. It may taste like cardboard, but to the kids, at least, it makes the end of their vacation that much more bearable.

Gingerbread Parties

One of these years, I'll decide that our elementary school's gingerbread house decorating parties are no longer blog-worthy. After all, it's pretty much the same thing year after year. Every child in every grade gets to construct a house out of royal icing and Graham crackers, then decorate it with as much candy as they can pile on there.

This was the first year where I could volunteer at two different parties and since I find it hard to choose between my two children in these situations, I ran back and forth between their mercifully close together classrooms. I made frosting, supplied gumdrops and helped with construction in the second grade class...before zipping over to the kindergarten to help Mam decorate her pre-made house.Mam's regular glasses were in for repairs and a prescription change (to something lighter!), so she'd been wearing her brilliant blue Rec Specs for about a week and a half at this point...going oh-so-nicely with all her cute holiday dresses. There was a reason she had no glasses on in her photo with Santa.

I zipped back to Smuch's classroom in time to watch him load up the center of his house with as much candy as he could...learning very little from his classmate whose house felt apart from all the candy pushing on the walls.In the end, it was a cute little house, which got dropped on the ground as Smunch tried to wrestle all his stuff out of the classroom at dismissal. Although I promised we'd repair it, I'm not even sure where it ended up after that afternoon.I imagine I'll find a very stale, dilapidated house in a shoebox somewhere in the coming months.

Mam also finished decorating her house...not without an added ceremonial hat.She carefully added a lookout bear on the roof.Lookout bear didn't make it home either, but he met a different fate than Smunch's house...devoured by a fierce predatory reindeer.

Crafty Holidays

Compared to many mommies I know, I'm hardly a crafty one, but I really went overboard for the holidays in 2008. I always drive myself crazy with projects at the end of the year and this year, was no exception. Instead I went exceptionally overboard. It's a wonder I made it to 2009 with any brains left at all.

It all started with the chocolates...I've made truffles every year for the past few years. They look really impressive, despite being pretty easy and they make great gifts for the teachers. Some cute little boxes from Michaels and a little menu of all the goodies inside, all tied with a festive bow. I don't know if the product really measures up to its appearance. I try not to eat many out of self preservation. But they sure look nice!Then came the cookies. I always make a whole bunch of cookies and have fun letting the kids decorate them with me. This year, I offered to take cookies to the staff appreciation luncheon at Smunch's school, so that put a little more pressure on. Still, I made far fewer cookies than I've made any other year. I just had too much other stuff going on. Just sugar cookies, gingerbread, white chocolate raspberry bars and something my family calls Graham Sensations.

I found a really fantastic gingerbread recipe this year and it got all kinds of raves. Too bad it was such a pain in the rear to deal with! And I didn't like how the cookies held up, despite having lots of flavor and remaining moist and chewy. Still, they were cute when they were all dressed up.I brought this platter of cookies to the luncheon, leaving precious few for my neighbors, who probably expect cookies from us by now.As happy as I was with my little tray of cookies, I felt really bad when the other mom who brought cookies indicated that she thought hers just looked too ugly next to mine. I bet they were just as tasty and she didn't spend her whole evening decorating. In some ways, her cookies were almost certainly the superior product.

Then came the class gift. In a moment of supreme volunteerism, I signed up to be the head room mom for Smunch's classroom. I like it. I feel like I'm "in the know". But it's a lot of work. I won't be doing it next year, I'm pretty sure, but then I've got another opportunity with an incoming kindergartner in Mam. I really like Smunch's teacher, so this isn't the biggest chore I've ever had. I'm just not super at delegating. Anyway, I digress. As room mom, I'm responsible for the class gift for the holidays and at the end of the year. I made things super easy for myself by sending the teacher a questionnaire at the beginning of the year, asking her about all of her favorite things...stores, restaurants, hobbies, etc. So I collected the money and set out to buy her a few gift cards for her favorite places. Naturally, I couldn't let this get by me in an uncrafty sort of way. I got a cute little rosemary bush at OSH, dark chocolates, gift cards to Macy's, Starbucks, iTunes, Target and her favorite Mediterranean restaurant. I added a bow. It turned out like this:It was a blast putting this together and seeing it turn out pretty well, but as you'd imagine, my head was swimming in "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens..." and I couldn't let that little opportunity pass me by. Seriously. How could I not find a way to put this creation in a brown paper package tied up with string?? Am I the only one who would see this as an imperative?To cap that whole little theme off, it turns out The Sound of Music is actually another one of Smunch's teacher's favorite things...but I didn't know that until after the gift presentation.

Last, but not least, I had this brilliant idea that I could get more moms to volunteer to help out at the annual classroom gingerbread house-making activity if I could make the younger siblings feel welcome. So, I offered to put together a few extra houses for the little kids (including Mam) to decorate. Because, you know, I was already making all the icing for the classroom anyway. What's a few extra houses, right?Turns out, it's really not that hard to make little gingerbread houses when you're not trying to do it with a bunch of first graders. I put together four tidy little extras in no time. But wait...at the last minute the teacher also told me she wanted all the candy I'd solicited from other parents to be sorted into one bag per student. Ack! Good thing it wasn't like the holidays were coming or anything!Fortunately, the big kids had a great time decorating the houses they'd made that morning...and the little kids were thrilled to join in. Even the one little sibling who showed up unannounced had his own house to decorate. It was sugary and messy, but such a success!