25 Days of Christmas

I have seen this idea on a couple of other blogs and Facebook pages and decided I want to adopt it.  Some people do it in place of a traditional Advent calendar, but I love the Advent calendar tradition, so I'm going to do it in addition to that. (Although I am still waiting for the Advent calendar I ordered from Stampin' Up to arrive!)  Anyway, the basic idea is that for every day of December leading up to Christmas, we will do one special Christmasy or family thing.  I saw a really cute idea on a blog, which I will have to find the link to, where the mom made 25 decorated envelopes and put the activity of the day into them and then hung them from a clothesline with mini clothes pins.  Next year I'm going to do that!  However, this year, since I didn't decide I wanted to do this until yesterday - Dec. 1 - and the boys are still pretty young, I am just going to make a list of 25 activities and we will pick one each day.  Hopefully, I will then blog about what activity we did that day, with some pictures!
I just decided to do this last night, but we did actually do a couple of Christmas activities yesterday.  We went to Walmart to get Christmas pictures of all the cousins together - minus the one who lives in Seattle.  We missed her!  Our 5 kids range in age from almost 8 months to 5 1/2.  Getting a good picture of them was an adventure!  I put on a lovely show for anyone walking by, singing "The Hot Dog Dance" from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, to try to cheer Zach up, after he was a bit freaked out by the photographer trying to position him.  We have several pictures where someone is looking away, making a funny face, picking their nose... Cole spent a while blowing rasberries, so about 5 pictures have his tongue sticking out!  And he has an epic scowl in one of them! But we did manage to get a couple of keepers.  I wish we could have ordered all of them, just to laugh at!  Some were pretty funny!  It's fun for the kids to have their cousins so close by and be able to do things like this!  Afterwards, we went and bought the boys their special Christmas ornaments.  I am getting them each their own ornament each year, so they will have a nice start on a collection when they move out on their own.  Cole is obsessed with Disney Cars, so he got a Lightening McQueen and Sally ornament, and Zach got a Tigger one.

Here are the ideas I have for the rest of the month.  Most of them are borrowed from other people.  We probably won't do them in the order they're listed.
1. Make some Christmas crafts.
2. Make a gingerbread house.  Should be an adventure with 1 and 2 year olds!
3. Make and decorate Christmas cookies.
4. Put up the tree and decorate the house. (Planning to do this on Saturday)
5. Go for a ride in the sled.
6.  Go to look at the lights.  Hopefully, weather permitting, we can go out to the Festival of Lights in Airdrie.
7. Buy a gift/gifts for a child who wouldn't otherwise get any.
8. Have a family movie night and watch a Christmas movie.
9. Make a snowman.
10. Take Christmas pictures - once the decorations are up.
11. Write Christmas cards and color pictures to send with them.
12. Make homemade Christmas gifts for family.
13. Go play at the Santa's workshop at the mall.  Maybe this will include a picture with Santa, but the boys are at that age where that might result in more tears than it's worth!
14. Have a special family Christmas breakfast.
15. Go to daddy's work Christmas party.
15. Read Christmas stories.
16. Sing Christmas carols.
17. Act out the Christmas story.  The boys might be a little young for this, but it'll be cute to try!

Those are all the ideas I've come up with so far!  I'm open to suggestions! 
I'd like to go to Once Upon a Christmas at Heritage Park, but our weekends are pretty busy, so I'm not sure if we'll squeeze that in.  Last year, we made fudge and took it to our neighbors.  This year, we don't know our neighbors very well, but that could be a great way to get to know them, so maybe we'll do that again.  Less fudge this year though, because that was a LOT of work!

Anyone have more ideas for us?  What do you love to do around the holidays?