It's Christmas! Day 21: Wrapping Christmas Presents PLUS Homemade Hot Cocoa Mix

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Ok, I have a confession to make. While I absolutely love Christmas and do consider myself pretty crafty, no matter how hard I try, I stink at wrapping presents. Like seriously, I try every year, but it’s just not that pretty. I don’t know what to tell you. So, I’ve decided to embrace the bad wrapping and have my son help me. That way, if anyone says anything, he wrapped them. Yeah, I know, I totally am throwing my son under the bus. Oh well.

Let’s get wrapping!

Phew! That was exhausting and felt like it took forever! But now it’s done. Want to see? Here are our presents, ready to be opened on Christmas morning!

Now that we're done wrapping presents, it's time to make some hot chocolate. But we're not going to make it for ourselves. Remember when we made our neighbors some gift baskets? Well, inside them, we placed some jars of hot cocoa mix, so today, we're going to show you what went into those.

First, we grabbed 4 16 oz glass jars.
We added our ingredients to each jar in even layers.
First is 1/3 cup of sugar.
Then, 1/3 cup of cocoa powder.
Next up is a layer of finely crushed candy canes (3 to be exact).
Then, 1/3 cup of mini chocolate chips.
Finally, we top our jar with 1/2 cup of mini marshmallows.

Tips:
- Add candy canes to a plastic bag and use a rolling pin to finely crush.

- Use a funnel to prevent spills and ensure even layers. Build a wide-mouth funnel by rolling paper into a cone and taping it in place.

Now that we're done filling our jars, we're going to screw on the lid, add a gift tag with instructions, and top it with a bow.

This is what our tags said:

Peppermint Hot Cocoa
You will need:
1 jar cocoa mix
6 cups milk

Steps:
1. Remove marshmallows from jar. Set aside.
2. Whisk cocoa mix and milk in pot set over medium heat until hot.
3. Pour into 4 mugs and top with marshmallows.

Don’t leave your wrapping until Christmas Eve. And make some homemade hot cocoa to share!

As always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 20: DIY Decor

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

Today, we are making some DIY decor. I know this is supposed to be all about Christmas, but technically, this craft is not Christmas related. However, for me, it kind of is. This is a present that I will be gifting to someone. That being said, you could easily use more "Christmassy" colors for your sign and have it say "Merry Christmas" instead to make it a Christmas decor item. So, let’s get started.

First, we need to gather our supplies. We’ll need a wooden sign with frame. I got mine at Hobby Lobby. I used my 40% coupon and snagged this one for under $14. It measures just under 2 feet by 16 inches. We’ll also need some vinyl, a Cricut machine, some transfer paper, a hot glue gun, ribbon, and some greenery.

First, we’re going to make and cut the design we’ve chosen with our Cricut. My dad is redoing a home in North Carolina and wanted some decor for when he goes to sell it, so I’m making this sign to gift him that he can just leave there. The design I was making was larger than my 12-inch mat could handle. If you have a 24-inch mat, you'll be fine, but I don't have one so I had to break my design into two pieces before cutting.

I am now going to put my design on my transfer paper and then carefully try to transfer my design to the wood. I actually messed this part up and put it on crooked, but I did my best to save it.

We want to now add some greenery to the top of our sign to make it look nice. Since I made a sign that has North Carolina on it, I decided to use dogwood since it’s the state flower. I’m just going to hot glue it into place and then add a bow to cover our hot glue spots.

After that’s done, we’re ready! It’s time to gift this piece and hope it makes the home a little brighter.

Never stop creating!

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 18: Make a neighbor gift basket PLUS Chocolate Snowball Cookies

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

The most important part about Christmas is giving. Whether you’re giving thanks, giving presents to your family, giving money to charity, giving toys to kids in need, or just giving a little Christmas cheer to other people, you’re truly embracing the true meaning of Christmas. In my house, we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and talk about being kind and how God has given so much to us. However, whether you live in a religious household or not, giving is such an important lesson to learn.

So, while we do try to do multiple things to give back during the holiday season (like ringing bells for the salvation army or random acts of kindness), today we’re talking about making a gift basket for a couple neighbors. We want to spread some Christmas cheer and make our friends feel special.

There were a couple things we needed to consider.
Will people actually eat cookies if we make them? (You know, due to this whole Covid thing.)
How much do we want to spend?
Who do we want to make gift baskets for?

After we answered these questions, we got to putting our baskets together. We included some homemade chocolate cookies, homemade candy, a jar of homemade hot cocoa mix, some finger puppets, a couple crafts, pencils, sharpeners, erasers, stickers, and notebooks.

Here's how we made the cookies that we ended up including:

Ingredients:
1 2/3 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/4 cups + 1/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Steps:
1. Add flour, baking powder, cocoa powder, and salt to medium bowl. Mix to combine. Set aside.
2. Add butter and 1 1/4 cups sugar to large bowl. Beat with electric mixer until light and fluffy.
3. Crack eggs into small bowl. Throw away shells and wash your hands.
4. Add eggs and vanilla to butter mixture. Mix until smooth and creamy.
5. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Mix until a soft dough forms.
6. Cover dough and refrigerate 1 hour.
7. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.
8. Scoop a level tablespoon of dough. Roll into a 1-inch ball. Repeat to use all cookie dough.
9. Add 1/3 cup sugar to one small bowl. Add powdered sugar to another small bowl.
10. Make snowballs! Dip each ball of dough in sugar, then dunk generously in powdered sugar to coat.
11. Set dough on baking sheets.
12. Bake 10 minutes. Cool 10 minutes. Serve.

I think they turned out pretty good! And they taste delicious!

Owen had a blast running up to their houses and putting our little gifts on their front porch!

So do something kind for someone else!

And as always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!

It's Christmas! Day 17: DIY Gifts PLUS an easy DIY for your kids

It’s Christmas! is a 25 day blog and vlog segment that I’ll be doing this December to bring you crafts, reviews, and ideas to make your Christmas season even more fun this year (especially, with this pandemic thing we’re all trying to navigate).

Hopefully, my family can inspire yours to not let this crazy year ruin the holiday season for you.

One very necessary part of Christmas is gift giving. With online shopping (hello, Amazon!), picking out gifts for people is easier than ever. Most of my family have wishlists that I can shop from. However, sometimes, I like to add a little something extra. Today, we’re talking DIY gifts.

I have a lot of crafting hobbies, but my main one is crochet. Here are the gifts I made for people this year.
I made a pocket shawl for my mother-in-law.

A couple cherry pie pot holders for my parents.

An astronaut for my son.

A Mandolorean ornament for my husband.

A small Dobby (you know, from Harry Potter) for a Secret Santa gift.

And Ron Weasley (again, from Harry Potter) for another Secret Santa gift.

My husband and I have recently gotten into 3D printing in the past year, so we made a couple gifts with that this year, too.
For my Secret Santa gift, I made a Ravenclaw bookmark and a spinning deathly hallows pendant.

I also made a Gryffindor bookmark for my other Secret Santa gift.

I plan to make a couple more things before Christmas, but I'm almost out of time!

Now, for the reason you’re really here, my son and I are going to show you how to make an awesome DIY gift that he made for his grandma and grandpa.

We made candle art! First, you need to cut a piece of tissue paper that just fits on your candle.
Then, draw whatever you want on this piece of tissue paper with markers. I had my son think about things his grandparents like and things he likes to do with them.

When you're done coloring, cut a piece of wax paper that fits around your candle, but is about 6 inches longer.
Put your tissue paper in place on the candle, wrap the wax paper around it, and hold onto that extra bit of wax paper while you carefully use a hairdryer to melt the tissue paper into the candle.

Not all gifts need to be bought from a store. They mean so much more and I get so much more excited to give them when I've put time and effort into the gift. Seriously! Try it!

As always, from my family to yours, Merry Christmas!