Christmas Cookies

We are planning to visit our families up north the day after Christmas, so I started packing a few days ago all of the "winter gear" we would need..... the boys had a great time with their skating/sledding/skiing helmets.  Seriously.... padded walls in our next house?  All of them put on their helmets and were running into each other, falling to the floor head first, wrestling, etc...... I just watched in horror as they were having a ball and I was fearing for our walls over the next 5 years... how do they know that helmets = more dangerous tricks??  Who will be our first ER visit..... shall we take a poll??  The up side to this, though, was that as soon as I got the helmet on Ben he stood up on the couch and fell back hitting his head on the coffee table... unscathed and laughing thanks to the helmet... maybe permanent helmeting??

Next on our Christmas preparation list was cookies for Santa.  Given the difficulty of baking from scratch with an active 15 month old in the house we opted for mix cookies this year (a mistake I probably won't repeat, but it worked fine). Mistake #2 was the frosting... I don't often buy canned frosting, so all I had in the pantry was orange halloween frosting... I thought I would have to use LOTS of red or green food coloring to compensate for the orange tint... I was wrong... just a little would have been enough:)  Even after baths everyone was stained for about 48 hours.... lesson learned, but the kids obviously very much enjoyed it!