What does a 3 year old want for Christmas??

Lots of lefse!

Excited about making lefse!!

Before Thanksgiving the store in town had a really great sale on potatoes (.89 for 10lbs!!). So, I got 20lbs and we made 20lbs of lefse...(probably won't be doing that again anytime soon:). Samuel's family made lefse quite often when he was growing up. I had never even heard of lefse until I went to their house for Thanksgiving one year. It is basically a potato tortilla.
We peeled, diced, cooked, and riced the potatoes the first night. The next night Samuel added the flour to make it a dough and rolled them out. We did it in the living room (not enough room in the kitchen or dining room) and got to watch a Christmas movie. Samuel rolled out about 95 lefse! It took us about 4 hours from start to finishing the cleaning. It was fun (and fun to eat). We took some to our Thanksgiving dinner and people really enjoyed it. Now we have only about 60 lefse in the freezer to use up:).

Abel helping Dad cut down the tree.

We went Christmas tree hunting not too long ago either. We got a permit to cut our own down (it was only 5 dollars vs. about $30-50 people pay for already cut). Samuel and Abel had never gone out in the woods to cut their own tree before. We used to do it quite frequently when I was growing up. We had a lot of fun hiking through the woods to find the "perfect" tree...well, we never did find the "perfect" tree, but we found one that worked! We had to keep reminding each other that this wasn't a Christmas tree lot and that none of the trees were going to be perfect, so we ended up with the last one we looked at. (Each one we saw was better than the last, so we finally just had to quit looking!) Abel and Owen had fun playing in the snow that was there and finding sticks and other things to look at.
Abel and Dad cut the tree down and Abel got to yell "Timber" as it was falling. We also sang "O Tannenbaum" as the tree was being cut (rather, I sang it and the other two just looked at me weird...). It was a fun outing as a family and made memories, which is what really counts.

On Dec. 3rd Bishop had their annual Christmas parade. It was cold and windy, but we still went and huddled together. We found a bench on the sidewalk and we sat there while Abel stood at the edge of the sidewalk and waved his little heart out. He even waved when no one was there and when the street cleaner came at the end of the parade. :) The highlights for Abel were getting some candy and seeing Santa. Later that day after we did some errands we went to the city park and he got to sit on Santa's lap. While in line to sit on his lap I asked him what he was going to ask for for Christmas. At first he said, "A post". Okay....I asked him a little while later (it was a long wait...) and he said, "A stack." A stack of what? "A stack of bricks." What an interesting child we have. :) Dad asked him later what he wanted to do with a stack of bricks and he said, "I want to build Rupunzel's tower." (have you seen the movie "Tangled" yet?). So, there you have it....if anyone has an extra stack of bricks laying around you can make this little boy's dream come true!

Advent has been more fun with him being older as well. He has always enjoyed the candles on the Advent wreath, but this year we also have an Advent calendar. He gets to open one door a day and it tells the Christmas story one verse at a time.


I will be posting our Christmas letter soon.