What traditions do you have at Christmas time? While traditions with extended family are great, I want to have traditions with just my husband and kid(s). Nick and I have bounced around some ideas, but most of them are still a few years away before we can do them. I'll share them in the comments!
PS. I'm not very Blogger savvy, but I discovered that if ever there's a post on someone's blog that I want to get the comments to I can have them sent to my email and not have to keep going back to that blog to find them. If ever you want to read up on other's ideas and suggestions for our club topics all you have to do is click "email follow-up comments to..." and then every time someone leaves a comment to a post it will be sent to your email. It's pretty much awesome! Then you can keep contributing to the discussions as if we were all sitting in the same room having the conversation in person during a club meeting! Yay for cyber clubs!
3 comments:
We make a gingerbread house every year (sometimes it's a train or some other object like a lighthouse). We make it out of REAL gingerbread, only because my husband is a genius like that. :) But those kits are fun too if you don't want to do the whole shebang. It's also a good one for kids since they can get into it EARLY. My kids started helping us "decorate" when they were just over a year.
We also do a "12 Days of Christmas" tradition where we do one fun thing for the last 12 days before Christmas. Some things we've done... deliver Christmas treats, cut snowflakes, visit Santa Clause, make a Christmas craft, bake sugar cookies, etc...
One thing I also love is to have special Christmas eve and Christmas morning traditions. On Christmas morning we don't turn the lights on in the house, but instead we turn on the Christmas tree and light every single candle we have. It seems to make Christmas morning less of a present frenzy and more of a special time together to think of our blessings and remember Christ.
I have more ideas... but, enough for now.
Christmas Eve we always have the kids open an ornament for the tree and a pair of PJ's. We like to watch Christmas movies and just snack and relax. We also like to read a Christmas story every night and we have a 12 scriptures of Christmas we do.
In church, we learned one from a neighbor and every year they write down a 'gift for Christ' and look at them the next year to see how they did. I would imagine you write down goals maybe to be closer to Christ.
I also loved Tannie's traditions of no lights. I think I'll give that one a try this year.
We started a "Three Wise Men" tradition a few years ago. At first it was three gifts set aside that we didn't open with all the other Christmas presents. We saved them for the end of the night. They were religious gifts. We did a hymn book, conference on cd, and... I can't think of the third one. We only did it this way the first year. We've since changed the tradition to instead of those three gifts being for us, we do it for other people. We pick three different families, individuals, or charities to support. It could be drawing a name off an angel tree, donating coats and scarves, buying toys for one of the retail toy bins, etc. We once gave some gifts to our neighbors kids because we knew they were financially struggling. We've given a children's version of the Book of Mormon to one of my husband's co-workers who once mentioned to him that she wanted to read the scriptures to her kids, but didn't think they'd understand (she's not active). And so on. Although I like our original idea of three gifts set aside that we don't open until Christmas night, I want my kids to understand the importance of giving to others and the true meaning of Christmas.
We're starting a new tradition this year. Nick wrote a Children's Book (that will hopefully get published) about the meaning behind the different ornaments on the tree and why we hang them. It will be a tradition to read his book every year!
Eventually I would like to have 2 Christmas trees; one for the kids and one with meaning behind it. My tree isn't up yet, but the decorations are all going to relate to the Nativity this year and they're all homemade. Last year I hung pictures of Christ on my tree and I LOVED it. It really helped me remember the true meaning behind Christmas.
One last thing. We've talked about doing Stockings on the actual day in history when St. Nicholas did it rather than on Christmas day. Nick knows the exact date, I can't remember if it's in December or January. We just thought it would be fun to have a tradition where the holiday spirit didn't all come to an end on Christmas day.
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