Dear Martha...

Wow, you outdid yourself in the current issue, with lots of easy and affordable projects.

Charlotte and Levi made snow globes. It was pretty easy collecting all the "ingredients." You clearly state in the  instructions to get glycerin from the pharmacy. My pharmacist seemed a little puzzled when I asked for glycerin. "You mean glycerin suppositories?" Uh, no. He then pulled out a bottle of liquid glycerin from behind the counter after I for some reason felt it necessary to explain the making of snow globes. Too bad he gave me the last bottle, because I'm pretty sure he was feeling the desire to quit work early to go home and make his own Martha snowglobe.

This turned out to be the perfect project for little ones with short attention spans. Glue fun little Christmas objects in the lid. Let them dry. Add distilled water, a few drops of glycerin, glitter for snow (Charlotte and Levi clearly felt that the more snow, the better), glue the lid on securely with silicone glue, then shake, shake, shake.

And this Christmas tree made of white lights? Genius. Sorry, Martha, I couldn't get a better picture. It's in the walk-through laundry room and it was hard to get a good angle.

I hope you don't send out spies to make sure we are following your directions to the letter, but in case you do, I'll just confess now. I didn't have the patience to fuse pieces of white felt together and then cut out the stars. So I just printed them on white card stock. Eek. I hope I don't lose too many points for that.

Not inspired by Martha, but inspiring just the same, we have had music from this Santa who just keeps walking up and down the ladder while the music-box Christmas carols keep playing (as the sound technician adjusts the volume):

And dancing, from this little snowflake tap dancer in her first performance.

The holidays are shaping up quite nicely...