More Frugal Christmas Cheer

 

 

 

 



I am thinking of renaming this blog 'Clever Things My Children Do So I Don't Have To'. I am really hoping they never leave home. This week it was Christmas cards from bits and pieces in the craft drawers, The Girl cutting and pasting using tiny cardboard scraps, and the little girls using up the button stash for bauble cards for their teachers.

 

Every year the girls make gingerbread houses, usually with friends, usually coating the entire kitchen in a layer of butter and icing sugar. Looking on the bright side, this ensures that the living area gets well mopped for Christmas..

 

This year I am trying to think of alternatives for those one-use Christmas items, and cake boards are one of those annoying things - you buy them, and they are ruined after one use, as the foil gets cut or ripped. I contemplated making my own wooden boards, and then I realised it would be so much simpler to use serving platters from the cupboard. One of those blinding revelations that's a no-brainer ... once you've thought it..

 

 

 

 

The Girl made stained glass windows by baking boiled sweets in the window spaces when she cooked the gingerbread. A tea light inside the house makes it very Christmassy indeed.

 

 

 

 

I am so glad my girls get so much pleasure out of making things, and know they can take raw ingredients and drawers full of recycled bits and bobs and make something useful and beautiful and delicious.

 

Me, I would rather play in the garden. Remember that pot I planted out in October? Actually, I don't think I had even got the seeds until about a week after that photo. Well now it houses two giant zucchini plants, and a cucumber and Tiny Tim tomato which are valiantly struggling against a sea of zucchini leaves.

 

 

 

Here they are, the poor poppets.

 

 

 

 

 

I think we will have our first zucchini for Christmas. You can imagine the excitement...