It's Homemade Ornament Night!

 It's a real phenomenon that the more excited I get each year about making magical memories! With my teenagers! Who will not always be living here in my pocket to constantly make magical memories with!, the less excited the teenagers get about doing boring stuff. With their boring mother. Who is ever more boring and less exciting every year that she lives in their pockets and tries to make them do boring stuff with her.

These days, I unashamedly bribe the teenagers with snacks whenever I have a magical memory-making moment in mind, something like, "Hey, let's all decorate the tree together, and look, I've made us hot cocoa and two kinds of popcorn!", or "Let's have a family ornament-making evening while we listen to Christmas music... and eat the Christmas candy that your grandparents sent us!"

We are all of us, from the dog on up, pretty food-motivated over here...

And that's how I manipulated all of us into spending the evening together around our big, beat-up IKEA table, listening to Christmas music, eating candy, and making some new ornaments for our tree:

This folded paper star ornament was super fiddly, but it uses the same paper strips that I have a zillion of leftover from making paper chains with little girls.

I finally got it just right:

And now it can hang out with its paper chain cousins!

Syd painted one of my smaller wooden stars:

And only added a little bit of teenaged flair, sigh...

Here's the star made from wood so old and interesting that I couldn't bear to sand it down and paint it something else:

I let Matt browse my Christmas Pinboard after he promised not to make fun of me for anything he found there, and he made this popsicle stick Nutcracker head:

Don't worry, because Matt's new Nutcracker has plenty of other Nutcracker friends to pal around with!

It is very possible that we ate entirely candy for dinner, and I didn't get to bed until the teenagers' idea of "early," which means that I'm exhausted already today, but the memories made were, indeed, very magical, and it was very, very worth it.