Traditions..

After whining about WII and the not so great moments of shopping, I then read our friend Stephanie's post, where she talked about the simpler things, like Christmas lights and Christmas music and telling us not to worry about the hustle and bustle but to happy and thankful. I got to thinking about some of things that mean Christmas to us in my house. Besides the tradional baking of the Christmas cookies (that's another post!) we have a wonderful tradition that we have been doing since the kids were little.

I buy a piece of green posterboard and cut it into the shape of a Christmas tree. Then we take it outside and put glue and glitter on it for garland. After that I get all of last year's Christmas cards that we received (I save them for this purpose) and the kids go through them and cut out different pictures that they like. Then we lay them all out on the table and start with 1 and go to 25.. If Billy picks first he writes 1B on the back, then 2M (for Matthew) and so on. The 25th is always a picture of the baby Jesus in the manger. We then lie each piece on the tree and I do the numbering underneath so they all fit. We keep the little pieces in a plastic baggie and each morning Billy or Matt will glue a piece on to our Christmas Countdown Calendar. It's a nice craft for the kids and they are 10 and 13 and still love doing this. This year, our neighbors wanted to do it to so we made 2 trees and cut out extras for them.

The other wonderful tradition we have is setting up the manger. The larger one was my Great Grandmother's creche and it has a light in the top. We have added crazy pieces through the years such as Eyore, and Fisher Price lambs. One year even piglet was in our manger. Also I still have the clay "ashtray" that I made my mother one year and she decided to use it as a trough. Billy made one too, in Kindergarten; now we have two troughs. I have been getting Billy a piece of a manger for two years and pretty soon he will have his own. We always hide the baby Jesus and take him out on Christmas morning.