I am unashamedly a lover of Christmas.. Of course, there are many many aspects of Christmas that I detest (mostly around materialism, wastefulness and greed), but the season itself, and how we choose to celebrate it brings me joy nonetheless.
Over the last few years we have been practicing being more frugal, wasting less, making more and giving truly meaningful gifts. We have also focused on creating family rituals that revolve around togetherness and fun. These are aside from the community and churchy stuff that we also do.
A few of these rituals include;
- Decorating the house with a Christmas tree and adding several home made additions each year. This year we have made paper chains, painted Christmas paintings and have hung the new (old) Advent calendar that was recently bought by my sister in law from the op-shop.
- Christmas cooking. This starts some time in early December (fruit "super" balls, gingerbread angels/stars/house, shortbread, fruit cakes etc) and finishes Christmas day with the baking of Christmas morning cinnamon scrolls and any lunch/dinner fare that we may be serving up. Oh, and a pav... can't forget the pav! Molly has requested a peppermint crisp topping this year after eating some at a friend's party yesterday. I am a traditionalist and like strawberries, kiwifruit and passionfruit but I am willing to be flexible so I may come up with a way to combine both! Fun!
- Women's Christmas brunch... now this sounds very "hoity-toity" however, it is really just an excuse for the women in my family to stop, eat, drink tea and gass-bag. Not sure when this is happening this year but I hosted it last year and I think the torch was passed on to the mother-in-law. Better confirm this soon!!
- Going to Nana and Pa's to put up their tree and decorate it. This is done at the beginning of December and the kids (although it was just Molly this year) receive a special Christmas-themed gift from Nana and Pa to use in the lead up to Christmas. Molly was given a cool sticker book this year.
- The advent calendar. This is a new one this year! It involves getting a lolly (yes, we do lollies.. it's Christmas after all!) and a written message with an activity to be completed during the day. Eg. Yesterday was "make icecream sundaes" and the day before was "go op-shopping with Dad". There are lots of funny and some more meaningful ideas, some of which I copied from one of my favourite bloggers Owlet. I will come back with some advent calendar activity updates as they happen!
So Christmas is a special time for us in our family.
What do you do for Christmas?? Why not write a post about it? I'd love to read it! Go on, go write one and let me know (in the comments) when it's done so I can
Some gorgeous traditions you guys have!
ReplyDeleteI think we will be putting our tree up one Sunday. I have no idea where we are putting it though as I have re-arranged the whole house since last year and it won't fit where it used to go. Also the 16mth will probably destroy it... I need to somehow keep him away from it.