Christmas Preparations

Two of our grandsons, ages 5 and 10 were over last night to decorate a gingerbread house. What fun to watch them do it without any supervision. What added to the fun was when they had pretty much finished our son's friend got into it! She confessed she had always wanted to decorate a gingerbread house and never had. Wish I had captured the expression on her face as she worked!

About a week ago our holiday celebrations began with a trip downtown Minneapolis to watch their annual Holidazzle parade. I had never seen it! The weather was perfect that evening-about 40 degrees. The parade is short, only about 1/2 hour of floats, band, and marching units, all decked out in lots of lights. Following the parade, we went to our son's for pizza and watch "The Polar Express", probably one of my favorite Christmas movies. The grandchildren were glued to the set-we had taken them to see the movie when it came out 2 years ago and the had just stared at the screen and didn't budge during the whole movie; even the youngest 3 years old at the time.

The next day, my husband and I went downtown again to Macy's to see the annual holiday display, Mary Poppins, this year. It was fun seeing the scenes with all the props from about the 20's. Then, down to the Mall of America to pick up a couple presents and to see the large gingerbread house. The outside was interesting-don't bother going inside. The outside was made of big squares of gingerbread (my husband thought were cardboard), decorated with pieces of chocolate and hard candies.

We got our Christmas snow today!