Christmas Traditions...old and NEW!

For the month of December we have Family night every night!!! There are books that are wrapped and numbered under the tree and when the girls do the advent calendar it tells them what number to unwrap. Along with the book we also have an activity! It makes for a lot of late nights, but more important a lot of fun!! Some books are fun Christmas stories, but most of them are about our Savior and what the true meaning of Christmas is.

We kicked off December with the "The Last Straw". It is about a mom who is fed up with her kids and their fighting so she decides to make a gave out of them getting along. They make a manger for Jesus and every time they do a good deed for someone they get to put a piece of straw in the manger. The object is to make a soft bed for Jesus on his birthday and the bonus is to have a peaceful household. We have been working on this all month and our manger is pretty full! We have two more days to try and make it especially soft! We have read about 20 books and the girls look forward to it every night.

Some of our activities have been cook s'mores over the stove, make snow globes, go shopping for sub for Santa items, go to Temple Square, and deliver our sub for Santa. Today we get to go look for an ornament that try to sums up our year and we are having a family slumber party in the front room. Tomorrow we are going to start a couple of new traditions! We are going to have a Christmas Eve fondue dinner and I hope the girls will have fun and cross my fingers.....eat their dinner. We are going to make a birthday cake for Jesus and sing Happy Birthday to him and each of us will give him a gift that we are going to work on this upcoming year. Followed by the opening of one present.....NEW PJ'S my favorite and then off to bed to wait for SANTA!! We have had a ton of fun this month! I am going to be kind-of sad when it is over. But maybe we can all get caught back up on our sleep!!