Preparing for Christmas

 I know this picture is fuzzy but I love how Elijah is just hanging out on the couch letting everyone else do the hard work!

We have two small trees for the kids rooms.  I let them put the tiny ornaments on their trees this year.

This is our Advent calendar I made a few years ago.  The pocket hold either a picture card or character.  We tell them the story of Jesus' birth every night and add a picture to the top of the calendar and a character to go in the kids nativity set.  The repetition helps them retell the story with us.  It is excited because this year they retell the story in more detail than before.

 Every night for our Bible story time we tell the story and have the kids tell us the story.  We add a person to their nativity set and then we pray for a people group.  A few years ago when Todd and I were beginning our family Christmas traditions we wanted to put emphasis on the nations.  So we made picture ornaments of about 15 people groups.  We hang them on the tree and in the previous years we let the kids pick one each night and we would pray for them.  This year the kids each picked a people group and we have been focusing on those three groups the whole month. 

These are the 3 people groups that the kids chose to pray for. 

In addition to our sharing/ the kids learning the birth of Jesus story and praying for other peoples to know Him on the 5 Sundays prior to Christmas we light the Advent candle and sing together as a family.  We really enjoy preparing our hearts and teaching the kids about our Savior during the month of December.  And as we were convicted a couple of years ago it seems out of place to lead up to Jesus' birth day and then open lots of presents and in a way celebrate ourselves.  So this year we will not open presents on Christmas.  We were in America last year and the kids learn really fast that Christmas means getting new toys and gifts.  We don't want our kids to think of Christmas in that way so we are going to open presents on New Year's Eve instead.  As a family we are going to be participating in helping the local people around us as well as finding ways that the kids can give "gifts" to the people group they chose.

 I saw this in a magazine I like seeing how our family has grown over the last several years!

 I need to finish Todd's stocking!  I need to do that ASAP. :)