Traditions
Admittedly, I’m having a bit of a hard time getting into the holiday spirit this season. I think the largest factor is the lack of snow. I grew up in Minnesota and we never had a Christmas lacking snow. Colorado is a little different and fluffy precipitation can be hit or miss this time of year. A good example: we were married the first weekend of November. A week or so before our nuptials, we got about six inches of snow. The day of, we were able to have our ceremony outside while our guests enjoyed 70+ degree weather.
While it’s nice not to have to shovel and crank the furnace up, I’d still like to see more of the white stuff in time for Christmas. Christmas just isn’t Christmas without snow. It feels…..weird.
Anyway, in an attempt to embrace the season to its full capacity, we put out most of our Christmas decorations this past weekend (the tree will move in on Saturday) and began, what we hope to be, our annual holiday traditions. Our hope is that B learns to love this time of year and that he truly understands what Christmas is really about. If we can help it, we’d like him to not only look forward to receiving presents, but also to really take to heart that Christmas isn’t mainly about presents. So we’ve incorporated a few things…
Each night before we eat supper, B puts an ornament on our Jesse Tree (which is a branch E pilfered from a crab apple tree down the road) and read the corresponding Bible story. We attempted to do this last year, but didn’t get through the whole month as E was traveling and I was going crazy in lone parenting land. He’s traveling again next week, but I’m hoping we can still keep it up. The second image shows B’s tree-trimming skills. He’s rocking that one little branch. 🙂 We’ll do this every day until Christmas day when the last ornament goes up.
Next we have our advent wreath. Our church lights an advent candle every Sunday leading up to Christmas, so we thought it would be neat to play along at home. This last Sunday was the first purple candle (hope), then we’ll go through another purple candle (preparation), the pink candle (joy), and another purple candle (love) before we light the white one (Christ) on Christmas day. We also read a Bible verse to go along with the corresponding theme of each candle.
We also have our little nativity out and I printed out some nativity activities for B to get better acquainted with the characters and the story. He likes to refer to the angel as Mary and the wisemen are all Joshua, but he’s very good at pointing the sheep and horse out. 🙂
Now hopefully we can get some snow!
