Sleep in heavenly peaks

I know I have been absent for quite a few days, so here is what's been shakin' at the House of Crackers.

On Sunday, Mom, Grandma & I spent the day completing our annual Christmas cookie bake-off. It was fun as usual & we had some laughs as we baked our 9 different types of sweet confections.

I can assure you that none of our cookies looked like these! This image is courtesy of Google images.

As Mr. Crackers insists on telling me all the time will tell you, I am a messy cook. So, this year I finally remembered to wear an apron. In addition to the usual wreckage I inflict on myself while I bake, it came in handy when I dumped an entire cup of powdered sugar down the front of me. Of course, my shoes were not as lucky as my clothes. Next year I'll have to buy some of those surgical covers, so my footwear can also escape the mayhem that ensues while I am in the kitchen. Thankfully, the damage wasn't too great & I was able to get most of the sugar off of my suede boots later that evening.

After just a couple burned batches (neither Mom nor I are good at multi-tasking in the kitchen), we finally found our groove and managed to get all of our baking accomplished.

Here's this year's list:
Russian Tea Cakes
Shortbread Stars
Chocolate Raspberry Linzer Cookies
Chocolate pinwheels
Gingerbread Cookies
Dreams (a butter cookie recipe passed down from my Great-Grandma)
Jam Thumbprints
Spritz
Rugelach (kind of)

Due to a somewhat tragic dough mix up, this last batch will be remade by Mom later this week.

At the end of the day, the Cracker children came by to help decorate some gingerbread people & to dump entire containers of sprinkles put some sprinkles on the spritz cookies. If you have never decorated cookies with kids before, you've been missing a lot of saliva in your cookies fun.

C's become something of a perfectionist lately, but K's rule of decorating is: some sprinkles for the cookies, some sprinkles for me. I am hoping some of those germs burned off in the baking process. If not, my advice would be to avoid the cookies that look like they were decorated by my kids. They are not hard to miss ! (I think I left these pictures in my Dad's camera - I'll have to post 'em later!)

On Tuesday, C had his Christmas program at school. This was my first such event as a parent and it was much better than I thought it was going to be. It was the tale of the very first Christmas. All of the kids did a great job, even if it was hard to make out what some were saying. It was nice because all of the kids really got into it, they are still young enough that they really let their enthusiasm shine right through.

That's C - up in the top row on the far left. You know, the handsome kid with the brown hair!

The program alternated between songs & spoken word. Every kindergartner got a chance to go to the front & have their moment to shine. Even the shy ones got up there, but went with another child for moral support. As C has never had a shy day in his life, he was very comfortable saying his line alone on the mic in front of everyone.

C's turn at the mic:

"The man took them to his barn, where he kept his sheep and cows and all his other animals..."

After his moment in the spotlight, he returned to his place on the risers where the children continued their recital including the song Silent Night. Try as we might, none of us (my parents included) can convince C that the words at the end of the song are "Sleep in Heavenly Peace". He insists on singing Heavenly Peaks. We tried to point out to him that this makes no sense, but he will not listen to our crazy brand of adult logic. It makes me wonder what else he was singing up there....

Sleep in Heavenly Peaks, Sleep in Heavenly Peaks

After the concert we adjourned to the kids classroom where we made the cutest nativity set out of clay pots, wooden beads and small pieces of cloth. I am not crafty at all, but I thought it was really cool.

Baby Jesus' head is somewhere under that blanket - you'll just have to trust me on that.

Once our art project was done there was a little time left for my hooligan to mix it up with all of his best hooligan buddies...

They just look like trouble don't they?

Then we got to leave early & it was time for a quick hot chocolate run before we picked K up from school.

Oh yes, and then we made the second run of the day to Starbuck's once K got in the car and IMMEDIATELY noticed our empty hot chocolate cups...we were so busted!

That should pretty much bring you up to speed on the goings on around here. Have a restful evening & may you sleep in heavenly peaks.