Christmas Eve

Stretching stockings is exhausting.

And then they went to bed, and I got to work. A Baby appeared in the manger,

and floors magically appeared from underneath Big Mess.

This was a hard Christmas Eve because I'd gotten only a couple of hours of sleep for the two previous days. Skylark was quite sick with a temp. of over 103 plus full-blown croup, which required all-night steaming and stripping and bathing.  I decided around 3 a.m. that I wasn't going to do gingerbread children for the first time in at least 11 years, so I took a picture of the bare plates....

And then this baby woke up.

And then I decided to just go ahead and make the silly cookies with a bunch of shortcuts, barely finishing in time for the children's thumping migration downstairs.


I probably should have just gone to bed, but sometimes I'm compulsive about cookies. (I'm sure there are worse things about which one could be compulsive.)

p