Christmas in household h...

Sometime after we had David, I realized that our Christmas was a celebration of consumerism, with a little Jesus on the side. Seriously, it was the time of year I was least likely to be sensitive to the things of God. The Lent season was about recovering spiritually from Christmas. The issue is far from completely resolved, but we've made some changes each year and have come a long way, baby.

Here are a few

1. Complete Christmas gift purchases by Thanksgiving (mostly). 

2. Finish family movie and photo calendar by Thanksgiving (Christmas gifts to the grandparents h from now to the end of time). 

3. Make a gift plan for the kids. When I don't do this, I buy way too much. Right now ours is:

• Stocking with small gift from Santa (or alternatively, inconvenient to wrap gift since Santa doesn't wrap gifts at household h)
• 1 fiction, 1 non fiction book
• Large toy
• Small toy
• Gift of presence (last year Chris took David and Jacob skiing and I took the little guys on separate dates)

4. Celebrate advent at home. We have a great weekly family devotional for the advent season. We light the appropriate candles and sing the week's carol before meals. 

5. Decorate only the parts of your house you feel like decorating. Do not guilt yourself (or anyone you may have married) into decorating anything.

This year we're celebrating the 12 days of Christmas as well. My good friend (who I miss terribly) Diane gave me this idea. I've picked 12 random days before Christmas. On these days, we'll do something fun together or do something for someone else. The boys know to look on the mantle each morning and see if there's a card announcing the day's activity. I'm going to try to blog these.

Day 1 was Tuesday. My parents gave each of the boys some money to pick out animals from Heifer.  The animals go to help provide food and money for needy families.

All that, and I've still had my first Christmas freak out. We couldn't find a good place to get a Christmas tree Sunday night. I almost started hyperventilating. The Christmas plan included decorating the tree MONDAY. Any later date was entirely unacceptable. Work in progress.

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