Christmas 2017

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas!
This was our first Christmas at our own house. It was so great! I'm not a huge fan of Santa so we're not doing the "Santa" thing with our kids. I don't have any real memories of Santa because I found out about it so young (and then ruined it for all of my friends). I guess it's fun but maybe the magic isn't there because I don't have any childhood attachment to it. So we decided to start some Christ centered traditions this year.

We opened presents very slowly. In fact, we enjoyed the stuff in our stockings for a while and didn't even get started opening presents until after 8:30 AM. It was all very civilized and I appreciated that.

We would open one and everyone played with it for a while. We had a really great time with these giant blocks.
 

Just look at that fireplace roar

Daddy fell asleep on the floor so grandpa and Quin built a tower on him

 

Yetti in my spaghetti was a hit

Ammon really enjoyed these hand puppets

For dinner, we had a Bethlehem dinner. Some people call it a Jerusalem dinner or an appetizer dinner. Basically, we just tried to eat foods that Mary and Joseph might have eaten back then.  We ate carrot sticks, cherry tomatoes, pomegranate, hummus, goat cheese, pistachios, dates, dried figs, dried apricots, oranges, and flatbread. We turned off the lights except the Christmas tree and a few electric candles and ate on the floor with no utensils. It was fun and made the Christmas story feel a lot more real to try to imitate the setting. Ammon thought it was the best meal ever. He walked around the picnic blanket eating whatever he wanted off of unattended plates.

After dinner we had a birthday cake for Jesus. It was a red velvet cake made with beets and I made the most amazing goat cheese and cream cheese frosting. We turned off all the lights except the candles and sang "O Holy Night."

After eating cake my plan was to write down our gifts to the Savior, which are like New Years resolutions but it's a gift of changed behavior that we give to Jesus. We ended up doing this the next day, but Michael and I wrote down our gifts on a piece of paper and put them in a stocking. I'm hoping that every Christmas we can review these gifts and see how we progressed during the year.

Does your family have any Christ centered traditions? If so I would love to hear about them!