Santa Cookies

When you're growing up, certain things are lots of fun.  Christmas being one of them.  There are certain aspects, though, you really don't think you'll give a darn about until you're older.  Santa cookies being one of them.  I think, growing up, Santa got ChipsAhoy's in our house.  Being a new mommy, in a world where everyone can get great ideas online, ChipsAhoy's weren't going to cut it for my little man's first Christmas.  No Siree Bob!

I tried to decide what would make a good cookie for the Big Fellah.  There's lots of options really, and no one seems to agree on his favorite kind of cookies (you'd think he could just Tweet the answer and make us mom's lives easier), so I remembered a great gift idea I had saved up and how cute those looked.  Plus, they have oatmeal, so they're kinda healthy, right?  How can Santa not love Yummy and kinda healthy.

So, off the the Interwebz I went, and found my recipe.  It's a slightly modified version of these great Bakerella cookies in a jar.  Only difference is the M&M color, really.  Oh, and the fact that for some reason, I couldn't fit any nuts in my jars.  They seemed big enough!  So, I made 2 jars of them.  One I gave to a lovely friend of mine as part of a Secret Gift Exchange we were doing, and the other I ended up keeping for myself.

The mix, and my pretty new mixing bowl for the holidays.

The only thing they don't mention on either blog, and I wonder if I did it wrong, is the fact that the darn Brown Sugar got so hard, it took more effort than anticipated to get it out.  It hadn't dried out, but packing it in really tight made it nearly impossible to get out with breaking the whole jar.  After that was fixed (thank you hubby), we had absolutely no issues, and soon enough, we were ready to cook them up!

Love my Stoneware!!  Makes baking cookies SO easy and foolproof.

Little side note here.  I used my new Pampered Chef bar pan and it gave me GREAT results!!  All my cookie sheets are done for, to the point that I can barely use them even with my fake silpat, or even Parchment paper.  I'd never baked on it before, just made veggies, fries and random pieces of meats and appies, but it worked great with the cookies.  Might need to get a second one in the future :)

OK, so we cooked them all up, got a bit over 2 dozen of them, did a taste test, and yup, these are the cookies Santa will be getting at our house from here on out.  Probably won't bother doing the jar part next year, but it made for a pretty picture, at the very least.

Ready for Santa

One thing we still can't understand though, is where the next picture came from...  I did leave the camera in the living room, cause we were scrambling to get in bed (it was passed midnight, after all)...  Wonder if Wayne and Lanny were around to help Santa out.

Not sure who took this one, as we were all snug in our beds.  Curious...

Cheers, and a slightly late Merry Christmas to everyone!

(And yes, I'm aware this isn't really a 'craft', but the jar sort of is.  I did get the lids all pretty with Christmas paper and Modge Podge)

Advent Calendar

Last post about Christmas, I promise!  I'm a big fan of those lovely, yummy chocolate calendars you can get every year.  I usually get hubby a Lego Advent Calendar, and I've been getting myself a Lindt one.  On a recent trip to Michael's, I found a paintable Santa one.  In my search for a new hobby, I figured this could be fun!  Little did I know it'd take me 3 months to complete it.  It needed quite a few coats, and the doors were a bit of a pain, since painting around the numbers wasn't quite doable.  In the end, I decided to do all the doors in Chalkboard paint (so we can change up the numbers every year), and the knobs in white and red.  Made it easier, but it's still not completely done, as the inside edges will need to be painted also (as you'll see in the finished picture)..  I'm fairly pleased with the end result, but at the same time, wish it turned out a bit better.  We did mess up the star on the tree, and Santa's face isn't done yet.  Hopefully I can finish him all next year before Christmas and use it with the little man.

Here he is after just the white parts were done (I think this is one coat).

You can't really see how weird Santa looks now...

And the completed (so far) version:

But he looks a bit misshapen when painted.

Another fun little thing I did this year, was show off our Christmas cards in a new way.  I was tired of just putting them on a shelf, so I had found a post about putting them on a ribbon on a door in the kitchen, and sure enough, it did look quite festive.  Hoping to do it again next year, but with new clothespins and on a few more doors too, so it's less cluttered.

Love getting cards!!

OK, this should really be the end of Christmas-y things, at least until next September.

Cheers!