We wish you a Merry Christmas...

Around here, we love the December Holidays, and we devote a lot of time to reading Christmas and Hannukah stories, baking treats, helping others, and learning about how God loves us. We use the Jesse tree template for reading through the Biblical stories in December and have found it enriches the holiday season for us, helping us focus on what really matters.

 Things start with the search for the perfect tree. We love AMP trees in Bradford - You can't find a bad tree there.

 Each year, we attend the light show at the U of M College of Engineering. It's created by students and rocks.

 This year, our little guy sang in the Christmas program at Park Ave. United Methodist Church. Oh, those little kidlets are so precious.

Living nativity at Crosstown Covenant Church, complete with animals, crafts and hot cocoa. We love that it was inside on such a cold night!

The best Christmas light show in the neighborhood, one block south of Minnehaha Parkway on Nokomis.

 The thing we love most about shows at Stages Theater in Hopkins is how you can always chat with the performers and snap a photo. This year, the show was Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

We had just enough snow for a (mostly) white hayride at Bunker Hills Stables.

The lights of Hannakuh brighten the dark nights of a Minnesota winter.

A tale of two light shows

When the world is dark and dreary, we crave holiday lights.

And so, we seek out light shows to bring the family to. This year we were lucky enough to hit up two fantastic shows.



The last few years, we've greatly enjoyed the light show at the University of Minnesota campus put together by the engineering students. Using thousands of LED lights and rocking music, the 25-minute show is not-to-be-missed. We take the lightrail down, with a thermos full of hot cocoa. It's a holiday treat.



This year, my dad introduced us to this great light show in Cambridge. The lights are spread out along the entire yard of this home near Moon Lake. Turn on the radio station and you can hear and see. We loved it!

FIAR: Paper snowflake activity

We weren't getting enough snow here this winter, so we settled for paper snowflakes. Then most of them ended up on our Valentine's Day cards!

This activity was part of our rowing of "Katy and the Big Snow" and "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Our inspiration was "Snip, Snip, Snow" by Nancy Poydar.

Live nativity at Edina church

I wanted the kiddos to really picture the Nativity, and so we hunted down a live nativity. Christ Presbyterian Church in Edina has a small one that was fun for us to drop by one Sunday morning.

The narrator read the story of Jesus' birth from scripture. We arrived in the middle of one reading and stayed through the reading of another. There was a break in the middle, so the whole thing took about 15 minutes. We loved the warm fire, and appreciated the hot drinks and cookies available under the tent.

Don't miss this Christmas light show

Nezt year, plan to head down to the University of Minnesota Campus to check out this great 15-minute light show.

Created by University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering students, the 2014 show was bigger and better than the year before with more than 100,000 LED lights, 400 individual controllable lights and 450 microcontrollers.

Lights surrounded the semi-circular Civil Engineering Plaza. The whole thing was synchronized to music composed and performed by University of Minnesota students for a 360-degree sensory outdoor experience. New features in 2014 were a giant 22-foot lighted tree, an 8-foot 3D snowman sign, and an 8-foot-by-6-foot lighted M. The light show was presented by the Tesla Works student group.

Shows were at 5:30, 6, 6:30, 7 p.m. on the Civil Engineering Building Plaza, 500 Pillsbury Dr. S.E., Minneapolis.

We loved it! The music selection was rocking, and the lights were magnificent. We rode the train down so we didn't have to worry about parking and enjoyed a nice walk. I brought hot cocoa in a thermos and some snacks. It was a great night out for the family.

FIAR: Cranberry Thanksgiving over the holidays

We started rowing "Cranberry Thanksgiving" by Wende and Harry Devlin around Thanksgiving and fell in love with it immediately. What a great book! And so is Cranberry Christmas -- a book I just had to buy the kids for Christmas! These classic tales are going to come out every holiday at our house.

The books gave us a reason to explore New England through videos and books and delve into cranberry farming and harvesting. Plus we got an excuse to make cranberry bread, cranberry relish and cran-apple crisp!

WE READ:
- Night Tree by Eve Bunting
- Cranberry Christmas by Wende and Harry Devlin
- If you Sailed on the Mayflower by Ann McGovern
- The Story of Squanto First Friend to the Pilgrims by Cathy Dubowski
- An Outlaw Thanksgiving by Emily Arnold McCully
- Thanksgiving on Plymouth Plantation by Diane Stanley
- The First Thanksgiving Day: A Counting Story by Laura Krauss Melmed
- Squanto’s journey : the story of the first Thanksgiving by Joseph Bruchac
- Cranberries by William Jasparsohn

WE DID:
As usual, we had a great handout with activity suggestions from over at HomeschoolShare.com.

We learned lots about New England.

This doubled as handwriting practice. I wrote the answers on the chalkboard and The Girl copied them on her worksheet.

Images of New England

Cranberries were a point of focus, of course. We learned all about how they're grown and harvested. Be sure to check out the OceanSpray web site.

Math and science experiments with cranberries. I discovered that cranberries I had bought fresh, froze and then defrosted didn't bounce! They had to be fresh!

We also baked some treats using cranberries, starting with the yummy Cranberry Bread recipe from the back of the Cranberry Thanksgiving book. Yum! (We subbed in Gluten-free flour).

Cran-apple crisp

 We decorated our own Night Tree. I think this is going to become a Christmas tradition!

We  also talked about our own Thanksgiving traditions. Instead of doing the "I'm Thankful" corn book in the Homeschoolshare.com materials, we continued out tradition of running a string across a doorway and hanging cards from it listing what we're grateful for.

Plus, I stumbled upon these fun Thanksgiving printables, so we brought them to our Thanksgiving Dinner for a little big of photo prop fun!

 We also used popcorn kernels to work on our estimating and counting skills (popcorn estimation).

There was so much else we meant to do, but we just ran out of time and space given how busy the holidays were (and then we got sick), such as: levening/chemical reaction experiments, baking soda bombs, starch experiments, elements of a good story, alliteration, similes (although we did read Crazy Like a Fox: A Simile Story by Loreen Leedy), silhouettes and cranberry potpourri.

WE WATCHED:
- Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
- White Christmas (set in New England's Vermont)
- How It's Made - Cranberries (Season 2, Episode 1 on Netflix)
- Fox - Wisconsin Cranberry Videos
- National Geographic Video: Cranberry Harvest
- Tales in a Treehouse: Cranberry Thanksgiving

Trick or Treating in downtown Minneapolis

This year our Halloween excursions included a trip to see the Wiggle, Jiggle and Jam show at the Central Library in downtown Minneapolis. Then they brought the whole group over to the Marquette Plaza across the street for some trick or treating!!