This Is This Week

This week, I’m sharing a bit about our holiday Christmas party.

As Sarah mentioned, we started a tradition a few years ago where Sarah, Joy and I gather together with our kids each Saturday in December leading up to Christmas. We dubbed the events “Christmas Saturdays” and we usually conclude the final Christmas Saturday with a gift exchange.

This year, we decided to focus on low-cost, homemade gifts to get the kids into the spirit of giving. Which yes, meant us moms pretty much took the reins on the gift making.

Since I’m not super creative and was pretty time-strapped this holiday, I figured I would try making homemade rock candy. I mean, how hard could it be?

Homemade Rock Candy

First things first, I ordered some of the special rock candy sticks. You all remember the kind from childhood, right?

Next, I pulled out a giant bag of sugar and got to work!

The random recipe I selected from the Internet said that the sticks needed to be in the sugar solution for a minimum of six days.

Because I knew I ought to account for Murphy’s Law, I started my first attempt two weeks prior to our party.

Let me just say….making homemade rock candy is actually not easy.

And to further complicate matters, the clean up was a disaster.

Crystallized sugar is so hard to get out of the jars and I made a huge mess all over the kitchen counters.

Attempt #1

I made a double batch of the sugar solution…

And then immediately got distracted by the kids and our new puppy.

I’m not sure where exactly I went wrong either.

Maybe I used too much sugar.

Maybe I didn’t boil it long enough.

Who knows. I just know that about an hour later, I got the feeling that it wasn’t going to work.

Six days later, I was proven correct. I let the jars sit as instructed but nothing really happened.

Attempt #2

Once I realized it wasn’t crystallizing the way it was supposed to, I pulled the sticks out and figured I could try to reboil the sugar.

But then I realized it would be way too tedious to melt the sugar out of each cup (see previous comment about how difficult it is to clean semi-hardened sugar out of glass jars) to keep the colors separate.

So I started over.

This time, it worked like a charm!

While the sugar was boiling, I dipped the stick in water and then sugar and left them to dry before I suspended them in the sugar solution for the six days.

I could sense the difference right away.

I had my kids make some back-up presents using Perler beads as a precaution, but in the end, the rock candy worked out and we had two nice presents to share!

Other Party Prep

Aside from our homemade gifts, we had to have food as well!

We tried to keep the fare light, but I don’t think we actually know how to prepare a simple meal.

We ended up making several kinds of pizza and dips and salad and cookies and two kinds of tater tots.

The BLT tater tots were delicious.

And we even had a party game, which the kids surprisingly played completely independently while we finished up the food.

This little ring toss game was a great clearance find on one of my post-holiday excursions with Sarah and Joy.

Overall, our Christmas Saturdays didn’t entirely go to plan (mostly because we originally intended to watch holiday movies each week and that never really happened), but the kids had a great time together and (hopefully) made lasting memories that are far more valuable than more screen time.

Oh, and the final result of my rock candy making endeavor?

A total success!

P.S. If you are crazy enough to try this for yourself, I highly recommend Dawn Powerwash.* I have no idea what chemical magic is in that stuff, but it took the crystallized sugar right off the jars with much less effort!

*This post is not affiliated and any references or links included are purely for informational purposes