New Traditions...

So this year, as we get ready to prepare for celebrating the birth of Christ, we are going to try our hands at some new traditions. First, there's the Advent calendar, something that hubby and I are not very familiar with. I have heard about them and seen some but have never done anything with them. Hubby thought I was making up the word and could only think of the Advent brand bottles everytime I said it. But he was supportive as I suggested (demanded) that we recycle our old Christmas cards to make origami boxes that would hold the activity and treat for the day. There are LOTS of cute and wonderful ideas out there. I just Googled Advent calendar ideas until I found something that I liked and could do in a reasonable amount of time with what I had. I found the idea for the origami box at Crafty Nest but just set up differently.

Crafty Nest

My creation

What's in box #5?

I put velcro on the boxes so I could move them around if necessary.  I searched around for things to do and came up with some of our own based on what we had available near us. Here are the list of things that we will be doing this December:

• It’s time to get our Christmas tree!
• Let’s decorate our house and our tree!
• Let’s write a letter to Santa!
• Watch a winter ballet show (E-pie has a ballet recital)
• Make an ornament
• Collect warm clothes to donate to others
• Watch puppet show (at the library)
• Mail out Christmas cards
• Play a Wii game together as a family
• Let’s go ice skating today!
• Time to bake some cookies!
• Let’s bake more cookies to share with our friends and family!
• Let’s go see some Christmas lights!
• Meet Santa Claus
• Special shopping trip with Daddy :)
• Let’s watch special holiday movie.
• Listen to Christmas music and dance!
• Make a gingerbread house!
• Read some Christmas books and drink hot chocolate.
• Time to wrap presents for our friends and family.
• Let’s have a playdate and have a servants’ heart as we do something for someone else.
• Take a walk in the park
• Ride a merry-go-round
• It’s time to open our stockings!
• Remember the Lord today and give thanks for all our blessings that we already have in each other.

The second thing we are doing is the Advent paper chain idea from Spell Outloud, a homeschooling mom of 6! She's got some great ideas on her site. Makes me excited to homeschool :D It's funny. I decided to make this (actually 2 copies so that C-bear will get to tear off a chain, too) and E-pie brings one home from school that she had made. We will hang her school one in her room to tear off at night after prayer. We will tear off the one I made in the morning for our morning scripture reading together.

Inspired by the lesson we discussed in our Sunday school class this past Sunday about remembering to praise God for our many blessings and to help be a blessing to others this holiday season, I decided to do something different with our kids' holiday party. For the past 2 years, a few friends and I have gotten our kids together to play and do secret santa. This year, instead of getting together to get more gifts, I thought it would be a great idea to show our kids how blessed we are and to be a blessing to others. The children will be the ones stuffing the stockings for our church's Project Kids Eat Ministry. We will still do a small book exchange but the emphasis will be on serving others. I'm really excited about it!

We will be bringing our little Elf on the Shelf back out again...E-pie named him Dopey last year. Hopefully, we will be on top of changing his location every night.

found our perfect fat tree :)

Hope I can keep up with everything.
I will let you know how everything goes ;)
Might  not be making homemade Christmas cards this year for the first time in  5 years. Might :O
I hope everyone is enjoying all the festivities of this special holiday season!

~ H