Team Mouse on the Christmas Tree

 

The Nutcracker battle is fought not just on the stage, but also on the Christmas tree this year!

And Team Mouse is finally winning!

I bought these super cute felt Mouse and felt Officer patterns thinking that they'd make adorable gifts for the other Mice and Officers in my teenager's Nutcracker casts. I only thought that because I sew by hand so rarely that I had completely forgotten how time consuming it is, oops!

First, you cut out all the tiny pattern pieces:

Then you figure out what color you want everything to be. I still have plenty of felt wool scrippy scraps (I just checked my gmail, and I originally bought this felt way back in 2017--definitely time to finish using it up!), and this kind of small felt figure is the exact perfect use for them. Wool felt is much more beautiful than acrylic felt, and has such a nicer texture, that it's worth it to use it in a project where both of those features are really highlighted.

Cutting out all the little felt pieces wasn't super fun because I was too cheap to go out and buy a proper pair of tiny scissors, but I did get to use my favorite heat-erasable Frixion pens to trace most of the patterns, and that's never not thrilling:

Finally, just spend a million hours hand-stitching the cutest little Mouse Soldier in the world!

Um, I did NOT end up making felt Mice and Officers for every kid in my kid's casts. I did make a different present for just the Team Mouse kids, but it was a lot quicker and easier than hand-sewn felt ornaments!

I do think this sewing would go a lot more quickly the second time, now that I know what I'm doing, and I DO have another Mouse and an Officer already cut out and ready to go. Frankly, though, I think I need to have an appointment with my optometrist first, because I'm not sure I've got the eyes for hand-sewing anymore...

DIY Borax Crystal Ornaments

 

This is such a fun and easy project that sneaks a bit of STEM into holiday crafting.

A few days ago, Will and I were in the mood to do a quick Christmas craft. We'd just cleaned the house for guests, so I didn't want to drag out a ton of crafting supplies, and we were already busy, so I didn't want to start something time-consuming and fussy.

Our solution: borax crystal ornaments!

The hands-on time commitment for these ornaments is just a few minutes, although be aware that the crystals will need to be left alone to grow for several hours, and preferably overnight. However, if you've got a countertop or table that doesn't get bumped every five minutes like my countertops and tables do, ahem, you can start this project in the morning and then check back in on it throughout the day to marvel at your crystal's growth!

To make your own lovely borax crystal ornaments, you will need:

• borax. I use this sometimes as a laundry booster, so I have it on hand with my cleaning supplies. If you don't already own it, research its cleaning properties and you might find that you'll be happy to have it on hand, too!
• pipe cleaners. I also have these on hand, although now that the kids are not so much kids anymore (sob), I suppose the time is coming that I'll have used up my last pipe cleaner and will have no need to buy more. Okay, that just got real sad...
• popsicle stick and thread. You don't need to use these specific materials, just something that you can tie to the pipe cleaner and something that you can rest on top of the container. 
• container. To avoid having to rinse a crust of borax crystals out of a jar, I cut the top off of some of the one-liter flavored sparkling waters that Syd and I are unfortunately obsessed with. Such wasteful packaging! Such delicious water!
• water and spoon.
• measuring cups. You'll need one-cup and a quarter-cup measuring cups.

And here's how to make your borax crystal ornaments!

1. Bend a pipe cleaner into a fun ornament shape. It needs to be small enough that it won't touch the sides or bottom of the container that will hold it, but otherwise you can create any shape that you like. The liter bottles that Will and I used were on the narrow side of the spectrum, so after some trial and error Will eventually hit on a spiral design that fit perfectly with plenty of room to spare AND looks utterly magical when crystalized!

You can crystalize two or three ornaments at once with the borax solution we use, and with Will's design we were able to do two spirals per container.

When you've got a design that you like, tie your thread to it, leaving plenty of length to wrap around the popsicle stick later.

2. Put water to boil, and while you're waiting, measure out 1/4 cup of borax and pour it into the bottom of the container you'll be using to grow your borax crystal ornaments.

When the water boils, measure out two cups and pour it into the container, then stir the borax well to create a saturated solution. The boiling water shrunk our plastic bottles a bit, but fortunately they remained usable.

3. When the solution is still, drop the ornament into the container and adjust the depth at which it sits by wrapping the string around the popsicle stick. The ornament shouldn't touch the sides or bottom of the container, and should be fully submerged. You can pour more hot water into the container to submerge the ornament, if needed, because this solution already has WAY more borax than required.

And don't forget that if there's room in your container, you can crystallize multiple ornaments at once!

4. Leave the ornaments alone to crystallize. Over the course of a few hours, they'll go from looking like this--

--to looking like this:

5. After about 24 hours-ish, remove the ornaments and let them air dry on a clean towel.

When they're completely dry, knot the string into a loop and hang them on the tree!

I don't know if these ornaments will last from year to year, but I do plan to store them and see. They're definitely much sturdier than the washing soda crystals that Will and I also tried; those didn't cover the pipe cleaner very well, and they started getting crumbly just a few days later:

Washing soda crystals look interesting through a microscope, but they don't make good ornaments.

If you want to turn this into a whole homeschool unit study (here's the very fun crystals unit study we did a few years ago!), here are some ideas:

• Make those washing soda crystals, and whatever other easy crystal recipes you can find. Compare and contrast!
• Try crystallizing objects other than pipe cleaners. Will and I did this, and we found that shells worked okay and wood worked less okay and was a pain in the butt to make sink. Give a kid enough containers, and I'm sure they could have all kinds of fun scrounging around the house and yard for objects to try!
• Look at the finished crystals through a microscope. My kids LOVED this kid-friendly USB microscope when they were younger. 
• Model crystal shapes. These models are more challenging (click on the broken image to be taken to the pdf model), while these are simpler. Copy them onto pretty cardstock, or draw your own decorations, and they'd also make lovely ornaments!
• Read about crystals. These are some of the books about crystals that my kids enjoyed when they were younger:

If you need to sneak in a media component to get your kids interested, Frozen and The Dark Crystal have fun crystal references, although The Dark Crystal will also scare the snot out of your younger kids. 

Family Gifts That Teenagers Don't (Completely) Hate

The original Beach Hair Don't Care buddies at Sleeping Bear Dunes in 2022!

When the kids were pretty small, I made up this thing where I give everyone a "family gift" on Christmas Eve. It wasn't really a big deal when the kids were little and they already always wanted to do stuff with us, but now?

OMG it's a big deal!

My nearly-all-the-way-grown teenagers are actually still excellent about acting like they want to spend time with their boring parents, but even then there's so much that takes us all away from each other constantly--everyone has jobs, the kids have school and extracurriculars all over the place at all times, then they have more schoolwork to do when they're home, then when they're done with all of that their friends would like to see them sometimes, too! 

So family time is extra precious now, and these family gifts are a sneaky way to legislate it into our busy lives.

Here are some of everyone's favorite family gifts over the years:

books and movies

Up through just a few years ago, we constantly had a family read-aloud going. It was real old-fashioned, and very much a stereotypical homeschool family thing, but we LOVED it. We plowed through a ridiculous amount of Jules Verne that way, and the entirety of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy, along with so much more. 

Other good books for reading aloud with families of all ages include the All-of-a-Kind Family series, Anne of Green Gables series, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark is Rising series, the Harry Potter series (buy the books used so you don't support Rowling), the Little House series, The Once and Future King, and the Sherlock Holmes novels and stories. 

The kids, well into their teenaged years, eventually lost interest in being read to, but we all still really like to watch long-winded television and movie series together--one of our goals for Thanksgiving break, actually, was to re-watch the entire Jurassic Park franchise, which we happily did over several nights. And our years-long, at this point, challenge to watch the entirety of Supernatural has no end in sight!

We've got a lot of movies that we like to watch yearly, with the entirety of October being Horror Movie Month and the entirety of December being Christmas Movie Marathon Month. A LONG, long time ago, I made everyone watch White Christmas during this month, not even exactly expecting my young kids to like it, but essentially just because I love musicals and *I* wanted to watch it that year.

Ummmm.... we all LOVED it?!? Mind you, we skip the "minstrel number" because it's gross, but over what must be, at this point, at least a decade of yearly viewing, we've developed a few different headcanons and secret subplots and a billion inside jokes that feed into the rest of the year, not the least of which is this particular number:

I quite like to sing it to the children whenever they're not getting along AT ALL.

Good movies and series to watch with the family include Doctor Who, Harry Potter, the Lord of the Rings movies, the Marvel movies, Psych, Sharknado, Sherlock, and Star Wars. 

camping and outdoor stuff

I leap upon any chance to get the kids away from their screens. I mean, screens are great, because that's how a lot of kids, mine included, do a lot of their socializing with friends these days, and I wouldn't take away their group chats for the world, but I LOVE it when there's a handy, no-fault excuse to be all, "Dang, no wi-fi or data? Guess we'll just have to talk to each other!" I went cabin camping with my Girl Scout troop last weekend, and it was pretty magical to see all the ways that they related to each other without screens. They played card games, listened to music, made Christmas crafts, cooked, and talked and talked and talked and talked!

Not every outdoor activity has been a hit, but most of us more-or-less enjoy activities like skiing, kayaking and paddleboarding, hiking, snorkeling, and bicycling. All the matching gear for that can get VERY spendy, but most of it you can keep using practically forever. And some stuff, like these hand warmers that I put in everyone's stocking last year, actually aren't too pricey and get tons of use over the winter. I can also still usually bribe teenagers to come outside when there are marshmallows, so fire pits big and small are always fun.

I wouldn't dare try to get away with giving camping stuff as a family gift anymore, but the kids used to like camping pretty well, and receiving gifts like their very own hiking backpacks and backpacking tents was once upon a time very fun! Fortunately, I bought that stuff to last, because even now when I have to make them come with me they can still use it all.

class or adventure

2021 pre-Christmas trip to New York City!

There was exactly one year in which both of my kids enjoyed traveling, and OMG I enjoyed every second of that year. I miss you, 2018! Both before and after, one or the other of my kids have been grumpy travelers, and sometimes I'm lucky enough for both of them to be accompanying me only under duress. 

Disneyland on Thanksgiving Day in that magical year of 2018!

But even when a kid proclaims to be absolutely miserable on the magical adventure that I have thoughtfully planned out for her, they still have a perfectly fine time whenever they forget to gripe about it. The crankiest traveler is also generally amenable to super quick family trips that we take just to do one or two especially cool things. Good family gifts include train or plane tickets, theme park tickets, concert or show tickets, passes to ski resorts or waterparks, and gift cards to trampoline parks, climbing gyms, and arcades. 

Everyone in my family also likes more guided experiences like museum or zoo behind-the-scenes opportunities, classes for skills like glass blowing or baking, and open-ended activities like pottery painting or candymaking. We also don't fight too much when we share subscription boxes, and it's fun to think of more things to add to the experience every month, like a themed movie or restaurant. 

And it's not quite a Christmas gift for us, exactly, but my town has a ton of opportunities to sponsor and shop for a local kid's Christmas wish list, and it is SO FUN! You get to argue as a group over which pair of baby leggings is cuter, and dither over Monster Jam trucks because you can't decide if the shark one or the dinosaur one is more fun, and pick out little stocking stuffers and matching blankies, and then you get all the extra fun of thinking about how much they're going to love their presents, and thinking of them again on Christmas day when you know they're probably opening their gifts, hoping that they're having an absolutely marvelous time. Here's the set of four siblings that my Girl Scout troop is shopping for this year, if your family doesn't have time for a full-on shopping expedition but still want to make some kids' holiday a little more magical.

craft or DIY kits

I love family projects, and I can generally get the teenagers on board, too, if the project isn't too corny. Whether or not a project is too corny depends on the teenager--one of them, for instance, has now declared tie-dye corny, which is ridiculous because tie-dye is AWESOME but whatever. 

Matt is the LEGO parent, and he and the kids happily dive into even the biggest LEGO sets. I'm more the parent who instigates projects that are sneakily educational so I can put them on the kids' transcripts, or the one who buys all the crap to make the latest Tiktok food trend.

Other good family DIY kits include sourdough starters, food crafting kits, cookie decorating sets, ornament making, and kits for making useful family stuff like bird houses or feeders, coasters, and bookends. 

games and puzzles

We don't play as many family games as we did when the kids were younger, although Cards Against Humanity is still a BIG hit with everyone. What we all still really like, though, are giant puzzles that we can work on while listening to our favorite family podcasts--currently, The Black Tapes and The Magnus Archives, because Night Vale is Will's only exception to her otherwise firm rule that she only listens to serial podcasts after they're complete.

There are a few games that I play with the kids without Matt, for some reason. Syd and I are the biggest fans in the world of the Hunt a Killer series; she buys me a new one for every gift-giving occasion, and then we have a whole evening together of listening to music, eating special snacks, and solving a murder. I also have separate Stardew Valley co-ops with each of the kids, and we happily spend time together each week polishing up our farms and working to rebuild the community center. 

Other good games and puzzles to do as a family are Scrabble, Quirkle, this Harry Potter co-op game, Minecraft, Second Chance, Monopoly, and any thrift store puzzle because you never know what you'll actually get!

matching clothing

Okay, not like MATCHING matching, because even I wouldn't go for that. We've never even gone full-on matching Christmas pajamas, which is totally mainstream now. It's more like we all just get the same kind of stuff and it's funny. One year those big fuzzy adult rompers were on trend, so I surprised everybody with their own handpicked fuzzy adult romper on Christmas Eve, and everybody but Syd still wears theirs on odd winter nights, and Syd only doesn't still wear hers because she had another growth spurt after that. Another Christmas Eve I bought everybody fuzzy novelty slippers, which Matt and I still wear but the kids have since decided that they're not "slippers people," whatever that means. And another year I discovered MeUndies and thought it would be hilarious to put literal matching underwear in everyone's stockings. It was, indeed, hilarious! Mostly, though, I just, like, give everybody the same kind of wooly hat, say, so then we're all just wearing wooly hats or whatever.

Other good matching clothing items are jammy pants, novelty socks, Christmas sweaters, sweatshirts (although the kids and I all simultaneously wore our hoodies branded with Will's new college during a summer road trip, and it was AWFUL because everyone literally thought we were on a school field trip, but Will did get us a school discount at the fudge shop so it was worth it), and college or sports merch.

If you've got any other ideas for family gifts that teenagers wouldn't completely hate, I would LOVE to hear them! With Will heading off to college in a minute, I'm really feeling the urge to pack in all the family bonding time I can get, and to plan more family bonding for long-distance and school breaks.