of ideas for christmas season traditions.
what are your traditions? what do you do with your kids? your family? your spouse?
i'm really hoping for some responses on this one, though if we follow history this will be a post to which no one responds...
here's to hopin' you can help me out.
xoxo
j
8 comments:
I am responding, but I think you know all our traditions.
Something we always do are Christmas Crackers. We fill toilet paper rolls (classy huh!) with little gifts for everyone and then wrap them up and put the a name tag on them and set them at each person's place at dinner. We open them before Christmas Eve dinner...the kids love "crack open a present before we eat. They are just little things, like a chapstick, or little flashlight or toy. I have been doing this since I was a kid, it's fun. You can buy them already made, but we like doing them ourselves. Just an idea. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker
I decorate the tree on Dec 2, to celebrate our first date which was a visit with Bud and Wilma's and decorating their tree. That doesn't help you, sorry, but it is pretty much the only cool thing I do. I was unpacking everything today (in prep for Wed)and thinking this exact same thing, especially since this is the first year with 4 kids! One thing we have always done with the boys is Santa only brings 1 gift, something they asked for, everything else is from mom and dad. I have often had new christmas jammies for them to unwrap on christmas eve. I saw a book today in my christmas stuff that I have no idea where it came from that has a christmas thought, poem or short story for each day starting dec 1. I decided that we should read those before dinner every night. Glad I got it out before Dec 2. If I think of anything else, I will email or post again!
My family always had a visit from "St Nick" (not the same as Santa for some reason) early in Dec. He would visit on the 1st Saturday of December. So that would be the 5th this year. It made us so excited for Christmas, but gave us a little treat to hold us over a few more weeks. We would put out our stockings sat night and sunday morning we would see that st nick filled them with lots of random goodies. Some candy, small toys, and also some necessities like socks, toothbrush, undies. Then there would be a big gift for the whole family to share. By big I mean like a family game or something. It was fun. I try to do it with me and Matt now, but he laughs at it and thinks its a funny concept. Not quite as magical to him as it was to me as a kid. I still love it and will keep doing it.
We used to celebrate Dutch Christmas on the 5th and 6th, similar to the last post, but you put your shoes on the porch for St. Nicholas to visit and leave a treat or small present. We also have always done an advent calendar (not the candy ones, although those are great too) that has an ornament for each day. I will show you Mom's if she brings it out. I am in the process of making my own.
For my kids, I do Christmas jammies on Christmas Eve (which I think you are still planning, too?) and I am thinking about building Gingerbread houses with those nifty little kits you can get at the craft store. Decorating a tree is good I guess, but with kids the ages of ours it seems scary! I like the book idea that Mel had.
And now I am rambling. Sorry. What are your ideas?
Forgot to mention about St. Nicholas... we leave apples and carrots in our shoes for his horse and have some sort of Dutch themed dinner or breakfast.
Well--let me think...here are some that we do (now and when I was a kid): christmas eve pjs, gingerbread house, we are also BIG on countdown/advent calendars--we always make paper countdown chains, also make little candy countdown jars (just little candies), Activity countdown calendar--this was always one of my favorites growing up--everyday there was a new activity to do--not always big, sometimes it was Play Hot& Cold Candycane, or read Christmas story, watch The Grinch, etc. But I loved opening the little paper each day to see what fun little thing we were going to do. We also made "door decorations" for our bedroom doors--just colored/drew christmas pictures and hung them up, or wrapped our bedroom doors like a christmas present. Another advent/countdown thing that I've heard of that I think would be fun, is to take a long candle, make 25 little ticks on it (with paint or whatever) and then every night read something together as a family and light the candle and let it burn to the next little mark. You could read christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, The Scriptures, etc.
The last big one I can think of is our Christmas Eve Program--I think a lot of people do this, but this is one of my favorite parts--we'd make programs and have it all organized--Christmas stories, games, songs, and then end with the Nativity acted out (when we were younger) and reading the nativity story and then singing carols around the tree with hot chocolate.
One tradition I want to start but haven't yet is doing a countdown with books. You have 24 books under the tree and each day you unwrap one and read it.
Some things we do are: making our own ornaments for the tree. We also cut down our own tree. We have several countdown calendars that we do. We also do the new pj's thing. If I can think of anything else I will let you know.:)
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