Hays Celebrates Christmas

Like most American stores, Hays couldn't wait for the start of Christmas. (That's partially why we have skipped talking about Thanksgiving and gone onto Christmas!) Starting the day after Thanksgiving, Hays began showing their Christmas spirit by listening to all of their favorite holiday tunes. Among the favorites: Noisy Boise Christmas, Hanson's Snowed In, Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You, O Come O Come Emanuel, among some others...

In the weeks leading up to the 25th, effort was made to decorate every nook and craney of our house, complete with multitudes of nativity sets, reindeer, lights, stockings, etc.

      

Yule Log

Reindeer

 

Nativity set #2

Nativity Set # 1

Nativity Set #3

A couple of evenings were devoted to baking and frosting cookies. The traditional cookie cutter shapes were perhaps a bit over shadowed by some of the hand sculpted shapes like baby Jesus, the Christmas turd, and a face replica of our support person.
Pictures to follow...

An evening was spent, watching Christmas Vacation while drinking personal quarts of eggnog (a holiday spin on our gallon challenge!)
Picture to follow as well....

1st Grade

The last week of school, the children put on a Christmas program (with a little help from their teachers!) Highlights from the program included a skit made up entirely by the Kindergarten class entitled "Christmas Dinosaurs" and an acrostic poem by the 1st grade (M stands for Mrs. Toe!).

 
Our holiday celebration in Hays wrapped up with a holiday staff party (because let's be honest, no holiday celebration is complete without a holiday staff party!) We tidied our place, and invited the entire Mission Grade School staff over for an evening of festivities which included a white elephant gift exchange. The hot items of the exchange: a mug full of candy, a hat and scarf set in Mission blue and gold, and pair of hand knitted hand warmers.

Halloween!

We know it is now December but when you have halloween costumes as epic as ours were you can't help but feel the need to share it with the world.

Every Thursday is big breakfast day at Mission. This means that Wilma and Chrissy (our lovely school chefs)  prepare a glorious feast that includes pancakes and waffles or french toast.  Along with those yummy carbs we have a sausage patty or link, hard boiled egg and a fruit.  We are also treated with the opportunity to use a fork instead of a spoon and to wash it all down we of course drink a half pint of milk. 

When we were discerning (yes, it was a formal process of discernment) our halloween costumes we wanted to have a group costume idea that the students at the school would really enjoy and some how we decided that big breakfast was our best and most delicious option. We spent many Thursdays secretly conducting research during breakfast and coming up with ideas on how to make our costumes. We also collected some cardboard. 

After many heated discussions we were able to decided how we would split the items up and create the costumes themselves.  David was the french toast complete with beret, Jenny was the 1% or green milk, Harry was the nibbled on sausage patty, Martha was the waffle and Megan rounded us out by being the fork.  We decided the egg and fruit were less essential food items and just ignored them, its not that we don't love them there just aren't enough JVs in Hays to fill the needs of the big breakfast costumes ensemble. 

The costumes were also a huge hit at the Billings halloween party even though we were sans fork. Everyone wanted pictures with us and to watch us dance the night away granted we were not able to sit down or do anything other than dance. We were worried that the other volunteers who have not experienced the Mission tradition but as it turns out everyone loves breakfast.

Needless to say our costumes were a big hit and we still hear mention of then on big breakfast or days when there is green milk at breakfast or lunch. Big breakfast will also never be the same for us. The costumes still reside in our hallway waiting for a chance to be worn again....