Happy St. Nicholas Day!

The girls put their shoes out last night before bed, in hopes that St. Nicholas would fill them with some treats!

Now, you may be wondering why they left their shoes out on the 4th instead of the 5th, since the 6th is St. Nicholas's memorial. Well, the Church tells us that Sundays always supercede other feast days (except for solemnities), so we decided to move the feast day up a day. Besides, it was easier to celebrate it on Saturday! But this way, the focus remains on Jesus and His sacrifice on Sundays. For Catholics, every Sunday is like a mini-Easter.

Caroline got chocolate coins, some nuts, a new St. Nicholas holy card, and a St. Nicholas book. Cecilia got chocolate coins, a fruit leather (she is obsessed with these lately!), an orange (also obsessed with oranges), and a sweet Advent/Christmas board book. I highly recommend this book - its sweet, rhythmic rhyme is captivating to Cecilia. Great book for toddlers! It also has a chicken that looks just like our barred rocks, although Cecilia decided it was 'Lorpie, the one Australorp chicken. St. Nicholas also used our printer to print out a few coloring pages of himself.

See how thrilled she is with her orange?? Strange child, hee hee. It's like Marge Simpson with potatoes... "I just think they're neat!"

reading their new books

Okay, so you probably can't tell in this photo, but it was snowing!! Okay, Northerners, go ahead and make fun of us. At least we didn't rush to the store to buy milk and bread! Of course, nothing stuck, but it was neat that it was snowing on St. Nicholas Day!

Cecilia takes her first taste of chocolate (other than the tiny bite of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream Uncle Tim gave her last week)... even though there was nothing special about their ingredients, I felt better mentally that the chocolate coins had come from Trader Joe's...

Our breakfast table decked out with holy cards, our crafts, and our cute little wooden St. Nick from Jessica. Daddy made waffles for breakfast - yum! And Cecilia got to eat her orange.

Cookie time!! This was our third year to make St. Nicholas cookies using a traditional German cookie recipe. They are similar to Swedish gingerbread - thin and crisp and buttery, yum!! The girls donned aprons and "helped" - meaning that Caroline used the cookie cutter a few times and otherwise, they rolled and cut and smooshed their own little dough pieces. This is an egg-free recipe, making me feel better about them handling the raw dough!

Caroline had this expression on her face in every cookie-making photo I took...

Licking the beaters after I made royal icing... ick. Who likes the taste of plain, wet royal icing? Not me!

And here are the cookies. I tried a few different styles:

this one with a "w" shaped beard

this one with a more realistic-looking beard

and this one with no beard

Which do you like best? I can't decide, so I made several of each design!

Caroline shows the cookies off before bed!

I used the stickers from St. Nicholas Center to make tags. And here they are, all wrapped up and ready to give away secretly tomorrow morning! Well, maybe not secretly for a few who read this blog and will receive them... oh well!

Happy St. Nicholas Day to all!