O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree...

How lovely are thy pre-lit, fake branches.

As per our custom, our trees went up on the Friday following Thanksgiving, and were decorated on Saturday.  This year I dared to look on Craigslist for a new tree to replace our 11 year old Charlie Brown Christmas tree, it was either a new tree or new lights for the old one-ours all were dead.  And by some wonderful stroke of luck, I found one that met my requirements: pre-lit, simple to put up, over 6 feet tall, and cheep.  I found one for $35, and then I sold our old tree for $25, so the new one came out to $10.  It's a 7 1/2 foot pre-lit tree, that assembles in just three pieces.

Eme putting up the star, Aidan beeing goofy.

So, there are no longer pics of my kids puzzle piecing the tree together, which I do miss.  But, it only took 3 minutes to get the tree up, and then another 15 to fluff it, all with only minimal "needles" shed.  This was also our first year to let Maddie put up her own ornaments, which she thoroughly enjoyed.  This is the first time in many, many, many years that our tree has been decorated with ornaments from top to bottom!


crazy kids, they had fun though!

Re-Purposing Candy

Every year (except last year when Halloween was on a Sunday), we have both a trunk-or-treat and Halloween night to supply with candy.  I like to think of it as "re-purposing", I buy a couple of bags of candy for the trunk-or-treat, we pass those out until they're gone.  When we get home, we let the kids pick 15 pieces of candy each, and then the rest of it gets passed back out for Halloween.

The only downside to this is what do we do with the copious amounts of candy that 4 kids are bringing home?  Again, we let them pick out some candy from their bags.  We then separated it out into chocolate (what Eric and I might eat) and hard/chewy candy (gum gets tossed right away, along with now & laters).  The chocolate candy somehow slowly evaporates at our house, even though we store it in the freezer!  The other candy we're going to use for gingerbread houses in December (a friend's idea).

But since we still had 20 Reese's pb cups, I thought I'd re-purpose them too.  I chopped them up, and added them in lieu of chocolate chips to my favorite cookie recipe.  They were fabulous!

I was going to use Snickers next, but by the time I got around to it, there weren't enough left.