Christmas Pajamas

This year I made homemade pajamas for the boys to open and wear on Christmas Eve just like I've done the past two years. I ordered the Michael Miller mitten flannel a few months ago, but of course, waited until a few days before Christmas to actually make the pajama pants. They really don't take very long. I think it took me less than 2 hours to make both sets of pants. I had a heck of a time finding plain colored long sleeve t-shirts in any of my local craft stores this year. So I ended up ordering shirts online from Jiffy Shirts. They were pretty reasonably priced even with shipping and arrived VERY quickly, within two days of my online order. I freezer-paper-stenciled the mittens on the shirt to match the mitten flannel of the pants. I bought enough extra flannel to make myself a matching pair of pj pants, but haven't sewn those yet. I will also have to order myself a t-shirt from Jiffy shirts to match. While I'm at it, I'll probably order a few shirts to paint for Valentine's Day. I'm thinking of doing homemade pjs for that as a surprise. We'll see...........


Below are photos of the pajamas. My boys knew they were getting these, but didn't know the "theme" this year. My little boy had fun guessing what he thought they would be............his main guess was "presents", but he was WRONG!

In case you are interested............I just ordered THIS FABRIC for next year's pajamas and I'm headed over to Jiffy Shirts to order the t-shirts for Valentine's and next Christmas too!

Storybook Christmas Tree

This year the boys and I decorated a tree for our local county historical museum's Festival of Trees. Last year for Advent, we read several Christmas story books and made ornaments to go with them. You can see the posts about the books and links to the ornament directions by clicking on "Christmas book activities 2009" on the sidebar of the blog. Since we already had the ornaments made, it was pretty easy to decorate the tree. I bought a white tree at Dollar General for $20, which I thought was a great price. I had also bought some red and tree ornaments from my favorite local thrift store. I made a chain garland with alternating red and green pipe cleaner circles. And I sewed some little Christmas bunting garland too. I used green tulle and red pipe cleaners for the topper. To illustrate the fact that our ornaments correlate with stories, I scanned the covers of all the books and made laminated ornaments out of the scanned images. Then I hung the "book" ornaments next to the ones we made to go with each book.

The full-length tree is shown below.

Close-up of the topper............

Cinnamon gingerbread ornaments............


Green pinecone trees.............

Pipe-cleaner trees...........

Popsicle stick snowmen (these are my favorite ornaments)............

Craft foam Rudolphs............

Felt poinsettias on juice can lids.............

Craft foam "J" is for Jesus candy canes.........

Felt Santa hats............

Glittery gold popsicle stars..........

Clear "snowflake" ornaments..........

We placed the actual storybooks around the bottom of the tree.

I'm not sure if we'll decorate a tree every year, but it sure was fun this year. I already have an idea for next year's tree brewing though! I need to start working on ornaments now because the ones I have in mind are hand-sewn from felt. They are REALLY cute!

We have been to the museum twice to see all the other trees and to vote for our favorites. You can vote for your favorite in the Youth and Adult categories. It cracked me up that my sons picked other favorite trees in the Youth category instead of voting for their own tree! (I totally voted for our tree both times, in case you were wondering!)