This weekend really put us in the Christmas mood! Friday afternoon I helped with the Kindergarten Winter Party. The station I worked was the kids working in pairs to wrap a friend as a snowman. You can see several examples of the snowman sweatshirts being worn! I felt a little bad that I didn't send William in his sweatshirt, but he was wearing his Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party t-shirt. The room mom was very smart to make nametags for the kids in order to group them for the activities. There were two nametags that said "Will" and none that said "William" so he graciously accepted one with his "short name."
After school, we walked home to pick up Daddy and extra layers of winter clothes to drive to Chicago to meet Uncle Ryan and Tarek at Christkindlmarket. We enjoyed our favorites: gluwein, hot chocolate, bratwurst, frankfurters, candied pecans, and chocolate covered bananas. We also did ornaments shopping. I picked out a tennis ball since this was the year the rest of my family started playing and a cruise ship buoy and anchor for our trip this year. William picked out a train and a motorcycle, because. . . well, who doesn't love (another) train and a motorcycle! He was excited to see Santa through the window but didn't want to go inside and talk to him. He has been talking about Santa a lot this year, and told me we need to leave out cookies. This is really the first year where he has talked to us about it, but we've been keeping most of the answers along the lines of "I'm not sure how. . . .but it sounds like there's some Christmas magic involved."
On Saturday we put up the stockings which we - not Santa - fill with odds and ends. Before they made it on to the hooks, William put two on as socks and went running through the house. Oh my goodness, we all got a good laugh at him jingling all around!
The mantle looking very festive with all of our stocking hung, the nativity scene, and photo cards from all of our friends! Filling up the ribbon with cards is one of my very favorite traditions!
