Christmas Traditions

We've been able to do a lot of our favorite Christmas traditions already this year. The kids put on a Christmas program at school every year and it was super awesome this year. Wynn has been practicing the songs at home for weeks. Sydney even had a solo part this year.

We decorated gingerbread houses as we usually do this year, but this year we had special treat since the elders were able to join us. 

At the Festival of Trees the kids got to decorate cookies, make Christmas crafts, and visit with Santa. It was really fun morning and something we've never done before. I hope to add it to our Christmas season festivities from now on. They also earned their money this year to buy gifts for each other, so on Saturday we took them to the Santa mall. Its a local event where people from the community come together and sell things for kids to buy for their families for Christmas. Everything is seven dollars or less. Its really great because people donate money so families with low income can apply to get free Santa bucks for their kids too. Its a fun tradition to help the kids get in the Christmas spirit and help other kids as well as think about what they can give their siblings. Of course, we saw Santa there too! 

Sydney's ballet school put on their annual performance of the Nutcracker. I look forward to seeing this classic every year and the different roles she get to play in it every year. This year she was a village dancer, soldier, and then an angel. They did a good job!

Today we decorated Christmas cookies and continued working on our Nativity puzzle and story advent we do every year to help retell the story of Christ's birth. The past few years as the LDS church has put out the Light the World challenge where we do different things that Christ would do each day for 25 days, we decided we would encourage our family to participate by putting a small fake tree up in our kitchen and buying special ornaments just for that tree. Each time we complete a  Light the World daily challenge throughout the weeks leading up to Christmas, we put an ornament on the tree. Its really fun to watch the videos each night and talk about the challenge that we can participate in the next day and hang our ornaments on the tree. By Christmas it should be a fully decorated little tree!

Merry Christmas