The Nutcracker and a Gingerbread House

We are really enjoying Christmas here at the Fiske house. It’s been a goal of mine to do as much Christmas-ing as we possibly can this year. I always find that by Christmas day, I wish I had done more celebrating and living up the season. So this year I am.
So we’ve been playing a lot of Christmas music. It’s pretty much all the time. And Tennyson has found a real love for one rendition of The Nutcracker that we own. It’s a seven minute long song and he will dance for all seven minutes of it.
We have this cute little video, and I apologize that it is just from a phone. I also apologize that it is a little long and slow in parts, so if you really want to just see the cutest part, fast forward to about a minute and half in. Although I highly recommend watching the long version.

My parents have actually made general Christmas-ing easier. They’ve done this wonderful 25 days of Christmas gift thing for Tennyson this year. It’s been a blast! They are enjoying it because it forces us to skype with them every night. And we are enjoying it because we’ve gotten all sorts of fun Christmas goodies.
Like an elf of the shelf. Which we’ve actually been coveting for a while now, but never willing to shell out 30 dollars on.
And a gingerbread house kit. With 1/2 pound of candy. We thought it’d make for a fun Sunday afternoon activity. And it did, although it didn’t last long.
I’ve mentioned before that Tennyson borders on OCD with his need to be clean. Needless to say, this was not a very clean activity. He was very eager to start putting on candies until he put on his first one and realized that the frosting was quite sticky and very hard to get off his hands. (Also, I’m apologizing for the fact that our pictures aren’t the best. Our camera was a little freaked out by the yellow shirt, close to yellow table, and yellow walls.)

But after much coaxing, we got him to stick on a few candies. In general, he was much happier just choosing out the candy for mom or dad to stick on.

Mom was really good at listening to Tennyson and putting the candies where he wanted them. Dad, not so much.

And our house turned out as a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.

Okay, maybe not so much. But we’ve got plenty of years ahead of us to work on our gingerbread skillz.