Letters to Santa

December is Christmas crazy all month long in our home. The advent calendar goes up on December 1st and every day the girls find a voucher for Christmas activities. Vouchers for ice skating, choosing a tree, Christmas crafts, Christmas movies, visiting Santa...

Every year the first activity in the advent calendar is the same: writing a letter to Santa.

After school on Monday the girls got to work on their letters to Santa. Ava had been keeping an incredibly long list of things that she would like for Christmas (it seriously included 157 items from the American Girl doll store; I'm not joking!) but she managed to cut her wish list to Santa down to 7 items: a chess set, a puppy, a computer and a snack cart, car wash, tent and camping grill for her American Girl doll.

Lola also had her eye on the entire American Girl doll catalogue but kept her list to just 3 items: a TV for her bedroom (so she can sneakily watch TV after I tell her to turn it off in the living room!), a play kitchen and a dog.

Mathilde is a little young to tell us what she'd like for Christmas - or to even know what she'd like - so the girls and I decided that she'd like to ask for a rocking horse, some building blocks, and a paper cup as she always tries to get mine when I drink coffee!

Every year we post our letters to Santa at Macy's. Macy's have a special mail box for collecting letters to Santa. For every letter that is posted in one of their mail boxes they'll donate $1.00 to Make a Wish, up to $1,000,000.00. This year I'll remember to put stamps on the envelopes. Last year I forgot and had to dig through the mailbox to pull the letters back out and stamp them!

Oh, and you may have noticed a certain little elf at the bottom of the advent calendar. That's Elfie Pokie Nokie, our Elf on the Shelf. Every year he visits us in December and starts his stay at our home by appearing in the advent calendar when it goes up. He's sure to get up to all sorts of trouble this year. You can see his adventures from last year here, here, here and here.

Lots more advent calendar fun coming soon...