First Week of December

I had the best plan of documenting all the Christmas fun we had around here in December. Well, I didn't get very far.

We are trying to do fun Christmassy activities every day around here.  Each day, Gabriela takes a link off of her paper chain counting down to Christmas.

On the inside is written an activity that we will do that day.  She also wakes up excited to find out where Jovie is hiding each day.  Jovie is Gabriela's Christmas Elf.  She watches over us and reports back to Santa every night on Gabriela's behavior.
Here's our recap for week one.

December 1: We went and picked out our tree.  We also got a little rosemary bush for the coffee table for Gabriela to decorate.  It smells wonderful. Gabriela and Lane got all our Christmas decorations out and we unpacked and admired all the ornaments.

December 2:  We decorated the tree and read most of our Christmas books.  We also had dinner under the Christmas tree, with all the lights out, except for the 1100 lights on our tree.

December 3:  Gabriela dictated her letter to Santa.  She also drew him some darling pictures. Gabriela has been very busy coloring, cutting and wrapping presents for us, then placing them under the tree. She's our little Christmas elf.

Gabriela drew, cut, and hole punched this angel completely independently. The only thing I did to help was put the string on so she could hang her ornament. It is so precious!

December 4:  Paper snowflakes!  This was kind of hard for Gabriela, so she told me what designs to make on some of them, and then I cut them. Now our window is all festive.

December 5: I gave Gabriela a wooden Christmas play set today. I loved it when I first saw it, and I didn't want to wait until Christmas to give it to her because she'd miss playing with it all season.  She had so much fun with it! Mrs. Claus was baking cookies and after Santa delivered all the presents with his elf, North Pole, he and Mrs. Claus sat around a fire to read Christmas stories together. Santa and his sleigh were flying around all over the house. She had so much fun playing with it, and I just loved watching her.

And that, my friends, is how far I got documenting. Of course, we did a fun Christmas activity every day. We watched Elf, we made Christmas potpourri, bought a gift to give to Toys for Tots, decorated our own wrapping paper, made ornaments, and did all sorts of other fun stuff.  I am totally going to do an activity each day next year. Gabriela had so much fun opening the paper chain. Some days, she even tried reading what it was on her own!

We certainly had fun with Jovie, our Christmas elf. She even followed us places when we stayed overnight any time during December.  Gabriela would get up and search for Jovie first thing in the morning!