Holiday Traditions

The day after Thanksgiving is when we decorate the house for Christmas.  We doing it while watching the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.  :)  This year I bought two small trees for each of the kid's rooms.  The boys now share a room and we've divided our home school room in half so that Ev can have her own room.  I gave the kid their ornaments and let them decorate their trees as they wanted and they turned out pretty cute and I got to decorate our large tree how I wanted. This year I put the tree in front of our large window. When you walk into our apartments our window is what you see so our tree is what you see when you come into our building.
For Advent this year the kids we are doing a Jesus tree for the first time.  We are using the Birth of Jesus Grapevine studies to daily draw out the story together and we are praying for other unreached people groups.  As we prepare for Jesus' birthday we will spend the day celebrating Jesus with a birthday party and lots of activities.  We really love keeping Jesus' birthday free of presents and focusing on us.  In the past years I have made a scavenger hunt through our house for the kids to find baby Jesus.  One year they were wise men, last year they were shepherds and I think this year they will be travelers on their way to Bethlehem.  I'm excited to see how this year turns out.