Tag Archives: ornaments

holidays, home, mommyhood, My Big Jesus

My Kids’ 5 Favorite Tree Ornaments

Leave a comment

I don’t know about your Christmas decorations, but there has been a lot of time, effort and money that’s been put into my Christmas tree. It’s an artificial tree that’s six years old. I’ve replaced the lights, compiled ornaments from every Christmas of my life (literally – we’ll get to that in a minute) and started getting some sweet things that represent my whole family.

This year, my kids have been carrying certain ornaments around the house and I keep having to ask them to be really careful. So I thought it might be amusing to share with you what their five favorite ornaments are… especially since none of them are handmade with pride or featuring their faces, like you might expect. 

1. The obnoxious singing cow. I’ll spare you details (aka the video of it happening) and just give you the cliff notes: it “moos” its way through “Jingle Bells” with questionable pitch.

2. My “Baby’s First Christmas” ornament. It winds up and plays a song that I can get stuck in my head for days. I don’t even know what song it is. The kids have fought over it so much that it’s currently sitting on the mantle.

3. The cement truck. It’s J’s favorite because it actually rolls, but every time he plays with it, he reminds me that the cement mixer doesn’t really turn.

4. This North Pole-Christmas Eve-alert ornament. Supposedly it changes color when it’s Santa begins delivering presents (spoiler alert: I’m the one that has to switch it to change the colors). It also plays a song, and it happens to be really loud. Like REALLY LOUD. So I put it where they can’t get to it. 

5. Anything with Ariel on it. I’ve spent my whole life getting Ariel ornaments from my mom. She’s my favorite princess and it’s kind of our thing. Now, EK really loves Ariel too, and so we’ve started getting them for her as well. So our tree is covered in Ariels of all sorts, and so they’re the favorites of my daughter. So naturally, two are currently broken and several were broken in years past and are glued back together. Poor Ariel. 

 There you have it. All the favorite ornaments of my three kids under five. Do your little ones have a favorite ornament?

crafts/diy, holidays, home, mommyhood

Easy Peppermint Ornaments 

2 Comments

One evening, I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, and saw that my friend Marcie had posted cute pictures of what looked like peppermint-swirled ornaments. Intrigued, I clicked and found out she had made them with her son! She posted some easy directions, and I filled in the blanks and made them with EK one afternoon!

I bought some Brach’s Star Brites, and EK spent several minutes taking the mints out of their wrappers…
And she was wearing only her tights. Because threenager. After we had a bowl of them ready to go…

I chose some metal cookie cutters that weren’t terribly detailed, spread them on a cookie sheet, and sprayed them down with some Pam.  
EK placed the candies flat to the pan inside the cookie cutters until she couldn’t easily fit any more. The ones that looked like they needed more mints, I broke a few into pieces and stuck them in (the snowflakes in particular). Following Marcie’s instructions, I then put them in a 300 degree oven, and waited. At first, I thought I was going to be waiting forever; nothing seemed to happen for the first 6 minutes. But when they melted, they MELTED. So I took them out!
  
(That was the ugliest. And it also broke. Yikes.)

As you can see, they melted maybe a little too much… and also, it didn’t help that my cookie sheet was warped, and the melted candy seeped out from underneath the cookie cutters. Oops. But the stuff off the edges came off easily while it was still hot (I scraped with a toothpick) and broke off easily when I hadn’t gotten it all off before it hardened. I took a toothpick and stuck it upright in each shape to be the hole for the fishing line. I waited for them to cool completely, and slid them (surprisingly easily!) from their cookie cutters. They were REALLY brittle. A few broke in the process, and I accidentally dropped two more and broke them as well. They were quite greasy, and I wiped them with a paper towel. But once the ones that had survived were strung up and on the tree, I really liked them!
I think I wasn’t watching closely enough, and let them get too hot, because they bubbled up in a few places. Watch really closely, even when it seems like nothing is happening!
  

Obviously, they’re made of sugar, so they’re a one-season type craft, but it’s so easy and cheap, I’ll do it every year! You should definitely try making them!