20th Day: Dingman Family Christmas Party

    On the twentieth day of our twenty five days we had our first annual Dingman Christmas party.  We decided that the last Friday before Christmas we should have a movie night with a Christmas themed pizza party, movies, and crafts.  It was kind of on a whim so it was just us this year- when I say on a whim I mean, we decided this at noon today since the freezing rain made travel difficult.  Hopefully next year we will be able to have family and friends over and do this on a slightly larger scale.

    We started it off by making a large Christmas tree alfredo pizza, complete with chicken and mini pepperoni 'ornaments' and spinach trimmings.  It was fun to make and delicious to eat!

Christmas tree pizza

    The pizza needed an equally good wintertime dessert so we made some s'more cupcakes.  They had a graham cracker bottom, rich chocolate cake with a gooey marshmallow center.  Marshall happily ate them up, Brad even went back for seconds and he doesn't even really like chocolate.

S'more cupcakes

    We decided to make some crafts next so they could dry during our movies.  We started with using a medium size craft cone with pom-poms and mini jingle bells.  Marshall loved sticking the pom-poms and especially the jingle bells onto the tree.  The best part was after he was done he was able to use the tree as a shaker when we sang jingle bells.  Now the tree is on our entertainment center as a special decoration that we will be able to use for years to come.

Carefully putting together his own Christmas tree

Enjoying his work 

    Marshall wasn't quite ready for our crafts to be over so I split up some of the green popsicle sticks from our advent wreath craft to make a simple classic tree ornament.  Marshall did well with sticking the pom-poms onto the glue dots I made.

Having a lot of fun making a classic craft

    After we were done with our delicious dinner and fun crafts we all cuddled up to watch some movies and read some Christmas stories.  Marshall loved every second our night had to offer- can't wait to start this tradition officially next year with others!

    Our twentieth day was a very Dingman day; we did some of our favorite things and ate some of our favorite foods.  It was (at least should be, weather permitting) our last day at home until Christmas Eve, and hopefully this new tradition grows as the years go on.  Tomorrow we will do another one of our beloved yearly traditions, we cannot believe it's already less than a week until Christmas!