yuletide greetings

We celebrated the Return of the Light, our Yule celebration, yesterday. We put up the tree the kids and The Map Man brought home on Saturday and decorated it with edible ornaments (I'll post pictures soon), which will remain with the tree when we move it outdoors for the birds to enjoy next weekend. (We'll add other edibles for the birds at that time too, and we still need to make gingerbread cookies to add now -- we had a slight butter problem so couldn't do the cookies today as planned.) We also created and decorated this festive gingerbread tree.

The most important job of the day was decorating our Yule log. Here Zoo Boy adds some greenery (trimmed from our tree).










J helps The Map Man add some fresh fruit -- cranberries and kumquats -- to our log.










Our finished Yule log in the fireplace, waiting to be lit. We ate our holiday feast picnic-style in front of the fire.









After dinner the boys discovered gifts in the tree. "Who put the gifts in the tree, Mommy?" both boys asked. I shrugged my shoulders. "I dunno, who do you think?" Zoo Boy guessed that they were there along and they just missed seeing them when they picked the tree out. J didn't believe that, but didn't offer his own guess. We each got a woodland animal finger puppet -- J got a raccoon, Zoo Boy got a fox, The Map Man got a skunk, and I got a porcupine. The kids spent the rest of the evening playing with the puppets in and around the tree, and enjoying the warmth of our Yule log, and our family.

What a wonderful weekend!