Countdown Day 13

Okay I have been gathering all the items for making gingerbread houses and was oh so confident that I had plenty of frosting in my food storage and so today when I went to grab it before announcing it was time to open the next number....I was wrong and not only did I have no frosting I had no powdered sugar to whip some up with. UGGHHH, no gingerbread houses today!

Luckily for me I had read all these fun ideas in the Family Fun magazine the day before so they were fresh in my mind and one of them had jumped out at me. We always at this time of year go over the proper gift etiquette and as hard as the younger ones try I know there have been some missed thank yous and such statements as I think this is for someone else or simply tossing the gift aside. I knew one of our numbers was going to be this activity of a lesson on gift etiquette and lucky for me someone had an ingenious idea and the kids LOVED it!!!

This is the idea(I forget now what the game was called):

You need as many empty gift bags as people in your family(I labeled them one for every member of our family)and then laid them face down for everyone to choose one and not their own. Then we all went running through the house to find a "gift" for the person whose name was on the bag and ran back to the table. When we all got back we gave each other our "gifts" and then you had to look at the person and say thank you using their name and say something nice about the "gift". They had so much fun running around the house and they wanted to do it over and over again. By the end they were more excited about what they were trying to find the person and to hear the nice thing they were going to say than they were about what was in their own bag...this game was priceless and I am sure we will be playing it many more times over the next couple of weeks!!!!