Christmas Weekend Chaos

Well I hope that everyone had as nice of a holiday weekend as the Frugal Upstate family did.

We started out with our annual gingerbread decorating, done on Sunday with a friend and his son. This year both Buddy and Princess decorated their own mini house made out of graham crackers. The two large houses ran about $8 each for the basic kit, and then I spent about $6 more at the dollar store on candy. I also found the bag of leftover candy that I had vacuum sealed last year and cleverly stored with the Christmas decorations. All of that with the additional candy our guest brought meant plenty of fun and sugar for all! I even have tons of candy left to seal up for NEXT year.

Christmas Eve we got together with our neighborhood gang just after lunch. Homemade caramel corn was my contribution to the food-a very frugal and well loved snack. We exchanged gifts for the kids, with a $10 gift cost limit (there are 9 children total!). This was a chaotic year, and I decided to really dig through my gift closet before I bought anything. I found 3 huge play makeup sets I had bought at Wally World last year in January (WAYYYYYY marked down). I did purchase a small toy for the one baby present, and Yankee Bill bought the boys all baseball hats (there was an inside story on that).

We left that party and went straight to church for the Christmas Pageant. I was in charge of costumes again this year. It went very well, although Buddy decided that he didn’t want to be a sheep at the last minute. So he sat with us.

After we got home it was a quick dinner of bratwurst, then jammies, the ornament exchange, and a reading of “Twas the Night Before Christmas. Off to bed everyone went. Well, the kiddos went to bed, we hung out, did the present thing, had some eggnog and watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV. THEN we went to bed

Surprisingly the kids lasted all the way to 6am before getting up-I was sure they’d get up at 5 or some such thing. Present opening commenced once Yankee Bill an I each had a cup of coffee in hand. After the presents under the tree we had French Toast Casserole for breakfast that I had put together the night before and stuck in the fridge using freezer burnt hotdog rolls. . . after all, a bit of freezer burn doesn’t really matter when you are going to be dousing it in egg and milk.

Then we opened stockings.

It’s just too bad that my deprived children didn’t get anything for Christmas isn’t it?

Christmas dinner was roast beef over at my lovely Mother in Law’s house. She asked me to bring a hot vegetable dish. I had a butternut squash I had picked up the week before and had yet to prepare, so I found a recipe online for Winter Squash Gratin that turned out yummy, and frugal.

Now we are just trying to recover from the chaos and prep for the rest of the week. Tomorrow we do our annual Surf and Turf dinner-the single most expensive meal of the year*! Yes, we actually do steak and lobster-this year for 4 adults and 2 children. (At $10 a lb, the kiddos are not getting their own lobster). We are having our friends over who spent 2 Saturdays of their time helping us paint in the new house.

Then we are hosting the neighborhood gang over for New Years Eve. I’ve been shopping ahead and planning for that one for a little while. . . .

But more of all that later.