Gingerbread houses

Really they are graham cracker houses, but they were just as fun and sweet.

Christmas cookies

We made Christmas cookies. The kids did more eating than decorating, but we got them all decorated.

Snow

It snowed . . . in California . . . in the valley. This is what we woke up to.

It's Christmas time

Today was the day we got our tree and it was a wonderful start to the Christmas season. We drove up to Apple Hill to pick out and cut our tree. We had fun tromping through the trees and then finally settled on a gorgeous 9 foot tree. We cut it down, got it wrapped up, got some free candy canes and then moved on down the road for a free train ride with Santa. Following that we drove to a local apple farm in search of apple pie and found so much more. We enjoyed some apple strudel, blueberry turnovers, and apple donuts. We got to taste some apple butter and apple desert wine (Yum!) and then grabbed a half gallon of fresh apple cider to take home.

After all that we also managed to get the tree up, lit, have a wonderful tofurkey dinner (prepared by James) and then decorated the tree while sipping egg nog and listening to Christmas songs. The kids were so excited to decorate the tree, they ripped through all the ornaments and had the bottom half of the tree decorated before I had cleaned up the kitchen from dinner. (It was so cute, I should have snapped a picture of the tree bottom half decorated.)

The tree is gorgeous and huge. I've never had a tree so large. I thought it was only in movies that they almost knocked over the tree while balancing on a ladder trying to put up the star, but nope, it happens.