Friday, December 20, 2013

And The Tradition Continues......


Have I mentioned that we are a family that LOVES traditions??!!  Well, if not…we are!

Here are a few more of our Christmas favorites….

*Nativity scenes….LOVE them!  I especially love collecting them from different places we have traveled to.  The one below was given to us when we married 20 years ago!  It had more animals once upon a time, but even being short a few from the herd, I think it is beautiful.

 
Obviously these two were some that we collected during our travels.  I love how they each show the nativity in relation to that locations culture.

 
 

*Next would be Christmas cards!  We love to receive Christmas cards and we keep them every year.  I have a basket full of cards from the past 10 years and each year we enjoy looking through them.

Some are picture cards from our friends and family and those are really fun to look at how everyone has changed.  Sometimes there are cards from people who no longer will spend Christmas on this earth and those can be kind of sad, yet also neat because they always get us started sharing memories of that person!

This year we are doing something a bit different in sending out our cards.  We are slowly going through out list and making a couple of cards a day.  We are spending time praying for that family and trying to put some time into each one before we send it out.  That has been really fun!

 *Now we have our puzzles!!  We buy a new Christmas puzzle each year, put out a puzzle table, and get busy solving it!!  The girls are really good at the puzzles and we are already on a second puzzle this year!

 
*Books!  Every year we purchase a new Christmas book to put under the tree.  It is fun to look at the changes our books have gone through.  We started with board books, then to picture books and now novels that we read together over the holiday season.

 

*RACK….this is our newest tradition….Random Acts of Christmas Kindness.  We plan out an act of kindness to do each day during the Advent season.  These have ranged from taping quarters to gumball machines, to spending an evening praying for friends, and even handing out hundred dollar bills to random people.  We have learned to step out of our bubble and make an effort to become more involved in the lives of others through this activity. 

This year we decided to recycle our Thankful Tree and turn it into our RACKed Advent tree! 
 
Click HERE to read about how we displayed our RACK Advent last year!

The neat thing about this tradition is that the Lord changes it each year!  This year we have been doing something a bit different, but I will share that with you tomorrow!

Traditions are a great way to make life comfortable, peaceful and joyful, but remember that sometimes traditions become stumbling blocks and keep our focus off of what it should be on.  It is always fun to look at new traditions and try some, but every family is different and what is fun for us might be a burden for you! 

Thank the Lord we are all so different because this would be a pretty boring world if we were not!


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