Oreo's, Ornaments, & Christmas

Luke again.

Recently my Dad got sick with a thing called Guillan Barre and he and my Mom are in Bakersfield, CA until my Dad gets well enough for them to come home. Andrea and I were thinking of how we could help them have a better Christmas and we devised a plan that involved making salt dough ornaments. I ended up really enjoying making them, and so I made like 30. If you want to try it, I think it was 1 cup of salt, 1.5 of flour or something . . . you know, I don't remember. If you need the recipe contact Heidi Williams, that's where I got it. This is what they look like before painting:

Heres what some of them look like afterward. I had a big set of nice acrylic paints that I bought for a class last year, and they really make the ornaments pop if I do say so myself:

While I was making my ornaments, Andrea reminded me that when we were at Mt. Vernon (the home of George Washington) She found ornaments of George and Martha Washington as gingerbread people. They were $10 each and I refused to let her buy them, so she made me promise that I would make them for her for Christmas. She went online and found them and I copied them for her and they turned out pretty fun:

The other project Andrea and I had were our oreo treats. We went to Zupas one night with Andrea's Parents and her Uncle and Aunt. Uncle Derek bought some of the Zupas Christmas treats for us. One of our favorite items were the chocolate covered oreos with crushed candy cane sprinkles. We decided that those ought to be easy and inexpensive enough to make ourselves since Zupas charges like $15 for a tin of them, so we tried it and they turned out very well! All we had to do was melt chocolate chips in our handy electric fondue pot, dip the oreo's in it and sprinkle the candy cane. We had so many they they ended up being our neighbor-treats. Easy shmeesy! Here's what they looked like when they were done:

As for what they tasted like, maybe you'll just have to wait for next year:)

We spent Christmas Eve at my sister Sarah's house in Herriman. Sarah had lots of "horse de orvours" as usual and we had a delicious dinner of potato soup made by Caleb and Lauren, bowtie alfredo with bacon in it, some fantastic jalepeno things wrapped in bacon, and salad. Oh, and pumpkin spice egg nog. After dinner we were able to talk with my parents on skype. It was sooo cool! It would've been so sad to go through all of our Christmas Eve traditions without Mom and Dad, it wouldn't be the same. But thanks to Skype they could be right there in the living room with us watching us perform the nativity play, sing hymns, read stories, and open presents.

Peter had fun playing with his uncles.

Blaze has caught up with Peter! Hopefully they will both become huge Perkins-ish men.

Andrea and I were Joseph and Mary . . . again. I think for the past three years its been us. I have other talent you know. I've proven it in the past! I'm a great inn-keeper, shepherd, wise man . . . and nobody can argue that I was practically born to be the star.

Grandma Perkins got a lot of her Christmas shopping before she went to CA to be with Dad. She bought Peter his first Christmas present, a jumper! He can't handle it for too long yet, there's just so much going on with all of the toys and boy-yoy-yoings, but he has been quite the bouncer lately and I know he'll come to love it. here's a little clip:

After the evening was over we went to the Wright's house. We woke up on Christmas morning and we had received several wonderful presents including lot's of clothes, a new nutri-mill wheat grinder, some games, etc. We spent the day playing all of the games and eating sweets. It was a wonderful Christmas!