--but we still got to spend two hours exhuberantly and fruitlessly rooting them on together (in a stadium filled to the max with fans of the opposing HOME team, even):
The marble maze fell, but we had lots of wild and wooly times constructing it all together:
Hell, even the gingerbread house fell--
--pitiful redneck shanty, but we had an awesome sugar-high time with a dear friend throwing candy all over it, anyway: 
Ah, family...even when you suck, you get to suck together.
A set of five gift tags featuring freakin' adorable vintage babies
A felted wool ball with a matching ornament
A stripey felted wool stocking
A set of four record bowls from albums of Christmas carols
Four dozen chocolate chip cookies, to be awarded to my students in exchange for their final papers:
A long line of tiny little record boxes in the making, to be filled with beads and string for a charity project in Will's preschool classroom:
An orderly arrangement of dinosaur cut-outs, salt dough shapes, and popsicle sticks, drying after an exhuberant acrylic painting session:
Tomorrow will bring more of the same, with stacks of tiny little envelopes to cut out and glue and sheets of homemade temporary tattoos to print and cut out, also for Will's charity project, and a heap of candy to stick with mounds of frosting onto a gingerbread house, while visiting with a good friend. 
But never fear! I rolled in from class late tonight to find that in the absence of traditional ornaments, the girls had decorated the tree with...
Dinosaurs! Hiding in every nook and cranny, perched on every branch and bough, and quite historically correct, since you know that evergreens were a primary food source during the Cretaceous period.
Not only did I earn a tidy sum AND get all my papers graded (something I had to do this weekend anyway, so it's like I got double-paid!), but I was just a couple of tables down from a green burial company, so during the slow periods I got to eavesdrop on LOTS of gossip about, well...burial hijinks?
Everybody managed to get something nice and new to them, and the thrifting gods were indeed smiling upon me, because I scored two items that I have been on the lookout for. To help me finally make the soap from the soap-making kit I bought from the Kitchen Girls, I found an immersion blender--something that I was widely warned is rarely found in thrift stores. And, to replace the lousy one that broke TWO YEARS AGO, I found a super-super-nice digital five-compartment electric steamer. 
All from stash. Festive, right?
The girls periodically get VERY into our mostly-thrifted rubber stamp collection: 
It would likely be a greater pleasure to use them if I took more care in keeping the stamps and ink pads clean. Seems like a lot of work, though...
--so I'm looking forward to seeing how well they do.
The provenance of the wood from Maine Wood Company looked pretty good, so I bought some little people, some bigger people, some trees, two snowmen, and some acorns.
Stalk me!
It seems that my late Mama, before she became too unwell, collected every single greeting card she had ever received--in our back hallway was a huge drawer, crammed to overflowing, with cards dating back from the 1950s. While spending the better part of Thanksgiving weekend sorting through them just to cull out the cards from exes (cards from exes are EXCELLENT for crafting with), I came across so many fabulous treasures that you'd just never find unless your grandma was a packrat, too.
It's freakin' adorable, right? It's from a big stack, held together with a rubber band, that came, apparently, from a baby shower held for my Mama when she was pregnant with her baby who was stillborn. The condolence cards for his death were in the same stack--keepsakes of joy and keepsakes of grief, all together.
It was my trademark, see?
That's to me, when I was a small child, from Aunt Birdie. She sent me a Christmas postcard, and a Christmas sticker, and some Christmas cut-outs from a box top, and just check out this beautiful letter: