Elise went to her first volunteer shift at Angel's Wish yesterday.  She said there wasn't much work for her to do, so she played with cats and puppies for two hours.  We stopped at a holiday craft fair at the local nursing home on our way home, and she found a bucket of Christmas trinkets, and a big red candle surrounded by plastic holly--it will fit in perfectly with our Chrismas decor.

We finished decorating the tree (or almost, as I think Albin still has a few of his ornaments left to hang), and we put every single ornament up somewhere.  I didn't know we had so many.  Some of the Christmas balls are hung on wall or the lights strung in the living room, and the bottom branch that we had to cut off to get the tree in the stand is also hanging up and full of ornaments.  It's all quite lovely.  We also bought another creche at Tuvalu, so now we have four.  (We're still thinking about making a new one for this year, too).

Albin zipped off to a friend's house for the afternoon to work on their joint physics lab report.  I hear they messed around a lot, but finished their report, too.  Yay, boys!  (In the short interval that both children were out of the house, Karl and I finished the family-pie Christmas presents, and they are wrapped and under the tree!)

Elise and I stayed home from church tonight.  She played computer games while I sewed, then we made a batch of beautiful orange playdough, and tried our hand at sushi.  I think we'll get better with practice.  She doesn't want to eat it, but I'm looking forward to lunch!.