Our Polar Express Party was a huge hit thanks to all the help from our amazing family and friends! I’m so glad that we decided to give it a go even though we don’t really have our house set up the way we want it yet… its better to work with what you have right now and not keep putting things off until everything is ‘ready’ or ‘just right’ because that day may never come!
The kids had a fun time and are already making plans for next year! I’ll share some photos of the setup.
There’s nothing like snuggling up with a cup of hot cocoa after coming in from the cold… ok, ok, I know… it doesn’t really get that COLD here in Florida but I sure can remember some cold days from my
time further north and I still enjoy a nice cup of hot cocoa every now and then.
I can remember my mom making us a pot of cocoa on the old wood cookstove. We would sip as much as we could before we had to head out the door to catch the school bus… at one time we had to walk 1/2 mile uphill to get to the bus and in another place we lived it was an even further walk downhill… not much easier if the driveway was iced over.
Here are some of our All-Time Favorite cocoa recipes:
Hot Cocoa (Powdered)
Of course, you can always use the ready-made kind at the store too but there is just something a little extra special about whipping up some cocoa from scratch and the memories you make will be cherished for a lifetime!
You can also whip up some fresh cookies to go along with your cocoa for an extra special snack!
Yesterday afternoon I had the kiddos help me dig out the Christmas decorations and the tree. I’m so thankful that we’ve used color-coded totes (dark green for Christmas) for our seasonal decor as this makes it much easier to find the necessary items.
The kids were a little upset that we didn’t put the tree up last night but they were super excited to find some early gifts on the table this morning.
Continue reading “St. Nicholas Day 2022”
We are trying our best to get back into some of our routines and traditions around here but it’s been tough going with one thing after another. I do plan to do a little something special for St. Nicholas Day and we hope to get our tree up then as well. I had thought about doing our Polar Express Party on St. Nicholas Day but it falls in the middle of the week so that wouldn’t work out well for anyone right now.
We won’t be doing anything really spectacular but I’m sure the kids will be excited anyway. I did manage to snag a couple of bags of chocolate coins a couple of weeks ago too so I’m hoping they won’t have melted by the time St. Nicholas Day gets here.
I just wanted to post this in case anyone else wanted to try to do something a little extra special… maybe you will have a chance to grab some things over the weekend to start a new family tradition. Maybe we can schedule a quick drive around town to look at Christmas lights or something as well.
Here are a few posts from previous years:
We usually make Santa Pancakes and I think we did something a little different last year but I can’t remember what we did for sure as it was so crazy then.
Before you think that you couldn’t possibly pull anything like this off because something always goes wrong here’s another post about how our day really went on a previous St. Nicholas Day:
Whether you celebrate or not we hope you have a great St. Nicholas Day and we pray that you are blessed beyond measure during this holiday season!
Here are some of our favorite Cookie Recipes:
Day 1:
Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies
Day 2:
Day 3:
Haystacks aka Noodle Cookies (2 versions here)
Day 4:
Easy Sugar Cookies (We also added some butterscotch and some white chocolate chips to a few and they were delicious.)
Continue reading “12 Days of Cookies”
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