Christmas Traditions

One of the things we talked about at Faithful Moms yesterday was different Christmas Traditions that we could remember from our childhood and new traditions that we have started with our families. The picture above is a Nativity Scene that my mom made out of ceramics in 1981. Every year I can remember putting up our tree the day after Thanksgiving and setting it up under the tree. It was always one of my favorite Christmas decorations and now I am so happy to be putting it under my own tree every year. I hope it survives through many more generations and we will tell the children that it has been under the Christmas tree every year for ____ years. Another tradition I can remember is every Christmas morning when we woke up my dad always had to go downstairs to make sure Santa had already gone before we could go down and open our presents. Our traditional Christmas dinner always was ham, rolls, mashed potatoes, corn, and always Christmas Cutout Cookies that we decorated and left out for Santa every year. Every year for Christmas we got a new ornament and our name and the year was written on the bottom of it. When we got married, we got to take those ornaments with us and hang them on our own tree. I still enjoy taking out these ornaments from my childhood and hanging them on the tree. Since Steven died, mom and dad gave us some of his ornaments to hang on the tree, a good way to keep his memory alive and with us at Christmas. I still get a new ornament every year, and so do all of the children.

Our gift tradition is that each child gets three gifts from Santa Claus (they do get things in their stockings too) The three gifts are symbolic of the gifts that Christ received and it helps keep the holidays simple. A new tradition we have enjoyed the last 2 years is picking out and cutting down our own Christmas tree which is something I hope we can continue to do. We always go to the Candle light service on Christmas Eve at our church. We still make the same Christmas Cookie cut-outs and eat the same Christmas dinner.

One of the suggestions yesterday was reading together on Christmas Eve. I thought this was a great idea. Some of the suggestions were The Gift of the Magi, The Little Match Girl, and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, followed by the reading of the Christmas Story. Another suggestion I thought was great was having your children (and other family if possible ) put on a Christmas play. Both of these ideas would make great Christmas traditions.