My cousin recently asked me about the fact that Santa Claus doesn't play a central role in our family's Christmas celebrations and wanted to know, "How do you maintain the 'magic' of Christmas without Santa Claus?"I've been asked that question a few times over the years. And my thought is always, "How does one have enough time to truly capture ALL the 'magic' that is in the story about Jesus' birth?"
Reading Luke 2, it would take a lifetime to wrap our heads around the incredible thing that happened (in the birth of Jesus) and I find more than enough 'magic' from focusing on Jesus' birthday to make it a memorable Christmas every year.
Another motivation of mine for not focusing on Santa was the fact that I didn't want to give our kids a reason to doubt us. If we allowed them to believe Santa was real, there would come a day when they would discover he doesn't truly deliver gifts with his reindeer. I'm sure the question might then cross their minds, "What OTHER things have we believed from our parents (i.e. Jesus, God, etc.) that is also a myth?"
A good friend of mine recently posted this on her Facebook page which added confir
mation to our decision ..."We openly tell our kids Santa is not real as I was scarred for life when I found out Santa was not real and my parents had lied to me!" I know there are some folks who say, "Oh come on, it's not lying, it's all innocent fun. It makes Christmas so magical and special." I guess what I wanted to communicate to my cousin was that David and I, along with our girls, feel like there is something amazingly special about celebrating Jesus coming to us as a baby. I'd like to share a couple photos highlighting just a few of our family traditions which feel "magical enough' to our daughters...
Hands-down, one of our traditions (that just MAKES our girls' December bedtimes) is the reading of The Advent Book by Jack & Kathy Stockman. Each night, we open a new (huge) door which reveals a gorgeous picture underneath with the next bit of the Christmas Story. By Day 25, we've read the entire Christmas story and our girls just love taking turns with each door.
Obviously, the girls can't get enough of the decorating and preparing that goes into our Christmas celebrations. We uploaded those photos in another post ... click here if you missed it. They love putting ornaments on the tree (every year, we add a new "family" ornament and the girls each get a new ornament), hanging the stockings and setting up the Nativity scenes (without Baby Jesus in it, at first). And what kid doesn't ADORE the food and sweets associated with Christmas? Every year, David's Aunt Ida is so sweet to send us the ingredients for her famous peppermint bark. The girls love eating it ...
And then there are the Christmas parties! We love the traditions we enjoy with our friends here ... this is a shot of some of the kids gathered for the annual gift exchange.
December 24th means Christmas Eve Dinner with friends ... always a special night.
In our family, we open our stockings on Christmas Eve (otherwise, I've discovered, they get lost in the shuffle of Christmas morning). Borrowing from my sister-in-law's tradition, we also do "Joy Stockings" where each family member writes a note about how every other family member brought them joy that year ... and we drop them in the stockings. We read the notes before opening the other little treats. Verity is shown here opening her notes. One of my favorite memories from this Christmas Eve was when we read to Moriah that Verity had written, "You bring me joy when you hug me." Moriah instantly walked over and gave Verity a loooong hug around the neck. Just priceless.
Then ... Christmas morning! And gifts! At this point, they wouldn't care if the tag read, "From Santa" or "From Mommy" ... kids just love presents, period. And so they dive in. We tell them to ENJOY ... because Mommy & Daddy feel so much joy by giving them these gifts. It's such a great way to celebrate the fact that God sent us the greatest gift ...which, by the way, we symbolically gift-wrap as the "final gift" the family opens together. We wrap the Baby Jesus figurines from the nativity sets and the girls open them and place them in the proper spot in the scenes (we have two). They love it.
We also spend some family time with an awesome resource from Family Life called What God Wants for Christmas. You can click here to see more info about it.
And the final activity? Singing "Happy Birthday" to Jesus! Ignore my pitiful cake, you'd have to see my oven to understand. But the girls love capping off the morning by singing to Jesus and of course, enjoying a bit of His birthday cake! =) Thanks for reading ... we hope each of you had a WONDERFUL Christmas as well!
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