Christmas in Utah (the crafting part)

Joe and I had my brother Chris and his family and Katie and her family for Christmas. I really wanted to do something crafty, but something that the kids might be interested in too. So I found this in my blog prowl: Family Yahtzee! It's so cute! Even if the kids aren't into it, at least it looks cute :)
It actually took a really long time to make, well longer than I anticipated anyway. We originally were going to have Home Depot/Lowes cut up a piece of wood for us, but they didn't have exactly the size we were after, but we thought we would try a smaller piece just to see. Well that was a terrible idea. The guy that was trying to help us out started using the huge electric saw thing they have, and it was scary! The saw kept kicking around the piece of wood. So eventually the guy decided he would manually cut us some squares, well all of the saws they have out for people to cut their wood with are not sharp and really are meant just to cut once or something. Anyway, it was painful watching him struggle to cut us squares, so I told Joe to tell him that he had cut enough for us and we would cut the rest! In the end we just bought the blocks at Michaels, but I had to go to several Michaels to find enough blocks! It was like the world was against me, or everyone was doing Family Yahtzee as their Christmas gift :)
Joe and I made these together which was awesome. We set up a card table in our living room and had various movies playing in the background while we painted, mod podged, and created our gifts.

It was totally worth all the hard work, I'm really proud of our accomplishment. It was fun to create these with Joe, he's really good at helping me, but it was especially fun to have him be involved from start to finish with this one. He was of course the biggest help with the images, but he's a great cutter too, which I'm terrible at. We used plain chipboard boxes from Michaels as well as the two inch blocks. We then painted it all the same off white color. Once that dried we put the colored paper on with mod podge, then the picture over that with mod podge. The pictures smeared a little, and now I know you need to spray pictures with a setting spray before you try to brush them with mod podge. We did the same for the boxes, we put the paper on with mod podge, and basically just covered the whole box with mod podge to help seal it all up. We printed the "Family Yahtzee" logo just from our print directly on the scrapbook paper. We even printed out copies of the score cards and instructions!
Now we need to figure out what to do for our 2010 gifts!

Primary Christmas Presents

Since I'm in the primary presidency in our ward, I was a participant in coming up with and creating our gift to the primary kids and teachers.
A few months ago our ward ended up with several boxes of chair covers (the soft padded chair covers that everyone wants to sit on during stake conference if you miss your chance at a bench. . .) Anyway, you'll see what I'm talking about in the pictures. So the other counselor thought that she would take a box and hide it in our closet until we could figure out what to do with them, but she knew they could be used for the kids Christmas present. Well, after some thought and some internet searching we settled on making lap desks. Diana came up with our final design, and although it was ambitious, we decided to do it. And here's our final product after hours of building and help from lots of people, I think they turned out really cute. We had a little Christmas party for the kids on the 21st and gave the kids the gift.








































We used melamine for the white board part. You can buy huge sheets of it at a Home Depot type place and have them cut it for you. Then we had vinyl lettering made with the 2009 Primary theme "My Eternal Family" along with each child's name. We also gave the children a zipper pull with the theme on it, you can find it here, they are really small, but totally cute. Each year there are a new round of songs that the children learn from the annual Primary Program in Sacrament meeting, so we put those songs along with others, like the Article of Faith songs, on a CD so that they can learn them at home too.

Here's a picture of most of the primary kids with the primary president. It's not a little blurry, but still fun.













The teachers unfortunately didn't get as awesome a gift as the kids, but we still thought they deserved something good for all the work they do. When I was visiting Utah in November I saw that my father-in-law got a teacher appreciation gift (he's the music leader in their ward, awesome!), it was this cute bowl of Hugs and Kisses, with a little poem. I decided to steal the idea. I found these really cute ceramic baking pans at Michael's and Joe helped me put the gifts together. I think they turned out nice.

A Braselton Christmas

Well, I guess since I've been a total slacker, I'll have to get back to posting our Disney pictures once I blog about Christmas. So here we go.

For Christmas Eve, Emily was nice enough to invite us over, so we went over to the Nicolich's for dinner. We settled on having ham and potatoes, just like what we would have if we were back in Utah. It was fun to spend the evening with Bill and Emily and their girls. And of course the food was awesome. Emily did a spiral ham with orange-horseradish glaze, and Joe decided he wanted to make "funeral" potatoes and a yam & apple casserole. It all turned out awesome.















I unfortunately ruined the pumpkin pie! It looked really good, but I totally forgot to put in the sugar!
After dinner, Joe had a quick violin lesson from Emily, which was totally fun. He wants to add violin skills to the guitar and banjo ones he already has.





















Sally and Alice got cute matching jammies, which Sally wasn't exactly excited about, but really, what 2 year old is excited to open a present of jammies? Still, they both looked cute in them














We watched Mr. Kruger's Christmas, and I helped Emily build some awesome blocks for Sally. Joe and Bill got some video game time, which is always necessary. It was a great Christmas Eve party, Bob wants us to call it, The Griglich, which is fine.


Joe and I went home and slept on one of our presents to ourselves. . . a new memory foam mattress topper! Super exciting! But really, it's totally awesome. In the morning we woke up to open our 3 brown boxes that we received in the mail from family and Rock Band 2!
Joe really wanted Rock Band, and when we saw the last one in Costco we decided to just do it, another gift to ourselves. We got jammies, a San Francisco puzzle & an awesome "card" from Joe's parents. My parents sent us a great book of art from James C. Christensen, Joe is really excited, he's one of his favorite artists.
My brother bought me the Gospel Art Picture kit which I had asked for, I'm excited to have it.






After opening all of our stuff we started on making our Christmas day meal. We sort of missed a traditional Thanksgiving, with turkey and what not, so we made up for it. The meal turned out nice, and Joe is so good to touch the nasty gross turkey!















Later in the evening we went over to the MacPherson's, Emily and Bill came too. We played some awesome Fusion Frenzy and had a nice Christmas chat.















Our Christmas was really nice, even though we weren't around family, which would have been the best. But it was low key, and virtually stress free. Joe and I made a pact that we wouldn't buy each other any gifts. Not having to stress about buying gifts for each other was great, we were able to focus on just being together. We also decided to do the 12 days of Christmas for a family this year. I had done this growing up and decided we should do something special for someone else this year. It was a lot of fun, it's about the only time you can doorbell ditch someone and feel OK about it. I hope the family enjoyed it as much as we did.
Here are a few Christmas day photos:


































Joe actually bought me this Willow Tree Nativity last year, but this was the first time putting it up. I totally love it.


Find the hidden Mickey!