Christmas Traditions, Part I

I thought it would be neat to do a few posts that tell about our Christmas traditions in both words and pictures--mostly because I'm copying and pasting all these blog posts into MS Word so that I can print out journals for my kids some day. So here goes....

First of all, we put up all the Christmas decorations during the week of and weekend after Thanksgiving. I try to get a head start on this during the week as we take the entire week off school. So I put up those interior decorations that don't replace any of my fall decor. I like to leave that up until Thanksgiving is over. Then, on Friday, I put up the rest while Greg tackles the outside. Greg is a very laid-back person, and things rarely bother him. But he gets SO frustrated at the icicle lights that never seem to work! It is the bane of his existence.

Here's a picture of our tree. I love these tall, slim trees. They fit so much better in the available space. I'm going to try to set up a tripod and get a picture of the outside with the lights on. It is really beautiful, in my humble opinion!


The next BIG part of our Christmas is the celebration of Advent. I grew up in Southern Baptist churches (when we were going to church anyway), and they didn't teach about or celebrate Advent. After we became parents, though, we began to look for ways to instill the true meaning of Christmas in our children's hearts.

We started with an Advent wreath, I think this is the third one I've had, and various Advent studies.

Then, thanks to the wonderful ladies on my homeschooling e-mail loop, we learned about the book Jotham's Journey. After reading that book three or four years in a row, we discovered two more books in the series, Bartholomew's Passage and Tabitha's Travels. The kids all greatly anticipate the reading of these books every year (unfortunately, they are no longer published). We've been through the entire cycle twice now. So, I guess we've been reading these books for at least 8 years!

Here is a picture of Greg reading Jotham's Journey which we have returned to this year.


Although the traditional Advent season doesn't begin until Sunday, December 2, this year, I got messed up and we started this past Sunday. That's probably a good thing as a couple of nights every week are very difficult for us to read since we're out until late.



Finally, the kids get one "family" gift on each Sunday of Advent. The first one has been the same for the past 3 years, the Lego Advent Calendar. Lego makes two different calendars each year, the Lego City Advent Calendar for boys and another one for girls. In previous years, it has been a Clickit calendar, which didn't appeal to us. But this year they made a Belville Advent Calendar for girls. Chase loves the Lego Belville stuff. So, I got Landon's agreement that we could get this calendar for 2007. (It helped that it was also cheaper!) Gerren had a fit about this, of course.

Stay tuned for a post on Christmas books!