 Welcome to the Wallach Way. My name's Emily. Today's video is our Christmas morning basket. So we will be beginning our morning basket each day with some laugh out loud Christmas jokes for kids. It is just full of different jokes. There's about four per page, so we'll probably do one page a day. Then we have some weird but true Christmas, 300 festive facts to light up the holidays. Emily absolutely loves these just random facts, and it typically sends us down some kind of rabbit trail to do more research. It's just fun to start the day with. We just do, I don't know, probably three or four pages a day. And then we enjoyed the would you rather during our Greek mythology basket so much that I decided to look for some Christmas would you rather. So just some fun Christmas themed would you rather. We'll probably do one or two of these a day. It's just kind of fun conversation starters. And then of course, that wouldn't be a morning basket without mad libs. So we have the holly jolly mad libs. Now I bought the bigger set this year, the larger mad libs, because lately Emily and I have been taking turns. So one day I will write, and then one day she will write. And so having the larger one makes it a little bit easier because the blanks are just a tiny bit bigger for her to be able to write in. So we'll do one of those a day. And then because we are always focusing on Christmas and holidays around the world, when I saw that squilt, which is super quiet and interrupted listening time, was going to be doing Christmas around the world this year. I decided to add this to our morning time. So this is their December 2022 listening calendar. So each day is a different Christmas song based around the world. And we can scan the QR code for the playlist. And then for our read alouds, we have a few different categories this year. These will be the ones that we read from daily. This is Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, a family celebration of Christmas by Anne Voskamp. So we will be reading each of the daily devotions. And then we will be doing the thoughts to discuss and maybe making the family activity. It's typically an ornament of some kind. I will let Emily decide if she wants to make that or not. We have the ornaments from the pop-up tree book. So she may just want to put those on the tree. But I did get her some wooden ornaments that I'll show you in a moment in case she wants to make them. And then another one that we will be reading daily is the How Winston came home for Christmas. Two years in a row, we did How Winston Saved Christmas. It's an adorable advent story. It has absolutely gorgeous illustrations. And then each day there's some kind of activity. So here you get to draw Winston. Another one here is making a cotton ball snowman. Writing a letter to Santa Claus with your very own envelope and stamp design. So it's just always a fun story. And then there's an activity each day. So we'll read the story during morning basket. And then if Emily wants to do the activity, she can do them afterwards. For the chapter books that we're gonna be reading a lot during morning time, we have Nutcracked. This is one of Emily's absolute favorites. And we didn't get to it last year. So I wanted to make sure that we got to it this year. And then we decided to add the last holiday concert by Andrew Clements. Emily read Frendle this year with her book club and really enjoyed it. So when I saw that he had a holiday book, I decided that it would be a great time to read that. And then last year we didn't get to this. So I thought we would try it this year. It's J.K. Rawlings, The Christmas Pig. So we are going to be reading through those three chapter books. And for our Christmas Around the World, we will be using my Santa's Tasty Trip Around the World and Holiday Fun Around the World unit studies. But in our morning time, what we will be doing to kind of make sure that we're incorporating that is reading from Christmas's coming, traditions from around the world. We read about half of this last year, so we will pick up where we left off. It took us longer than I expected because we kept finding really fun rabbit trails to go down and we ended up watching videos on different things. It is an absolute gorgeous book with so many interesting things about how they celebrate around the world. So I cannot wait to dive back into this one. And then we kind of wanted to compare a little bit. So I got this Christmas Around the World, which just has these different countries. And it's a little bit simpler. So as we read about the different areas in the other book, we can reference them here. And then the same thing, this is another Christmas Around the World book that I wanted us to have a third reference for. So again, we will just kind of read as it matches up with either the unit study that we're doing or the other book that we're reading through. And last for read-alouds, I have a stack of picture books. I normally let Emily pick whichever picture book she wants for us to read that day. So typically when we've done all of the rest of our read-alouds, I'll say, okay, go pick which picture books we're gonna read and she'll pick one. So this is the stack that I have as of right now that she'll be choosing from. We have The Nutcracker, How to Catch an Elf, How to Catch a Reindeer, How to Catch a Gingerbread Man. Emily loves this series, obviously. Walk This World at Christmas Time. The Legends of Christmas Treasury. Now this actually has three different books within it. It has the Legend of Saint Nicholas, the Legend of the Candy Cane and the Legend of the Christmas Cookie. So when she picks this, I tell her, you know, we're gonna read this for the next three days. Jan Brett's Gingerbread Christmas. Olive, The Other Reindeer. Santa's Story. Red and Lulu. Dasher. The Wild Christmas Reindeer. Humphrey's First Christmas. The Legend of the Poinsettia. The Bear and the Star. My personal favorite, A World of Cookies for Santa. This is a new edition this year. Emily is obsessed with the Christmas song. I want a hippopotamus for Christmas. So when I saw that there was a picture book, I had to grab it for her. The Legend of Old Bifana. The Story of Three Wise Kings. The Christmas Tale of Peter Rabbit. Snowman at Christmas Time. Everybody's Tree. Last Stop on the Reindeer Express. The Tree That's Meant to Be. And The Reindeer Wish. And for hands-on activities for her to do while I'm reading aloud, it is puzzle season in our house. So I grabbed these two new Christmas puzzles. They're glitter puzzles. So I know she's going to absolutely love that. But we have a ton of Christmas puzzles that I've bought over the years. I just decided I would show you the newest ones. I will have a blog post linked with all of them though in the description. Pain by Sticker Kids, Holly Dolly Christmas. She loves these. She actually finished I think this exact one last year. It comes with the stickers. And then you basically stick them on by number and it completes a picture. And then here's a few examples of some of the pictures. She's also been really into perler beads lately. So I picked up the Christmas perler beads. It comes with like a tree, a reindeer, a snowman and a candy cane pattern. And then some different perler beads but she has a ton of beads herself already. And then this is what I was talking about some of the wooden ornaments. These are the ones that she can use if she wants to do it for the jessie tree ornaments. But last year I did something similar and she had a blast using all of these. There's like, I think seven or eight of each design in here. I mean it has markers that she can draw on them with or she'll paint them and it has like twine and string. She had a blast though. She really enjoyed making these for friends and family and kind of getting to design her own. So I decided to pick them up again this year. And then the last thing I got for hands-on activities is a latch hook kit stocking. We've never done latch hook before. So this is gonna be an experience for us. I actually even bought myself one of these two because it looked like a lot of fun. It's just kind of a barn farm looking Christmas stocking. So I will let you guys know how that goes but I thought it would be fun to add some handy crafts to our morning basket. And then last but not least, obviously we have games. Now we have a ton of Christmas games, like a ton. I will leave a link in the description box. The links, most of the ones that we own. But to put them in morning basket, I decided that there needed to be a little bit of criteria this year. Because I found myself last year telling her, no, we can't play that one for morning time. No, we can't play that one for morning time. Because some of the games would require more than two players and Kevin doesn't always do morning time with us. Or the game play would be really, really long and it just wasn't perfect for our morning time. So I picked specific games for our morning basket that would work well with two players and play in 15 minutes or less. Well, could be played in 15 minutes or less. So the ones that I picked with that criteria in mind are the Disney Princess Present Party. Now this game can be played with ages three up. So if you have a little girl who loves princesses, this might just be the perfect game for her. It is for two to four players. It's an adorable card game where you are helping the princesses sort out their Christmas presents. And then we have Chip and Dale Christmas Treasures. Sorry, there we go, it wasn't gonna focus for us. And this is another adorable game where you're helping them collect treasures and treats for their winter stockpile. This game can be played with ages five up. And then we have Grinch Grow Your Heart. This can be played with ages six up. And it is a fun game where you are trying to help the Grinch grow his heart based off of what you are doing and stopping him from taking the presents. Then of course, we absolutely love Spotted. So we have two different Spotted versions here. This one is the Rudolph Spotted. And then this one is just the Holiday Spotted. We got this one at Target a few years back. This one I got on Amazon. So it's a little bit easier to find. Obviously one's a little bit smaller than the other two, but they're both equally fun. And then a few dice games. This is Lumps, which is just a simple dice game. It's the Coal, all the dice are black. What I like about this game and the Absolute Dice Christmas is that you are basically playing to see who can get to, let's just say, a certain number first. And so I can adjust that number based off of how much time we have. So if we don't have a lot of time, I can say, okay, whoever gets to 100 first wins. If we have a little bit more time, I can say 300 or 400. So I really, really like those because I can kind of adjust them to what's gonna work for what time we have that specific morning. Before I fly to the North Pole, I'm gonna leave you with a joke. How does Christmas Day end? With the letter Y, get it? Because day ends with the letter Y.