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Christmas Traditions

It's an interesting time of life, to be a young family without any set traditions of one's own.  Isaac's family has theirs, and my family has ours, but we've yet to develop "The Traditions of the Isaac Gould household."  As our boys are starting to understand the world around them more and more, we've been talking a lot about how we want to shape the special events of life within our family.

The focused conversations started about six months ago, when I stumbled across a blog post (which of course I can't find now) by someone who had chosen to exchange Christmas presents at Thanksgiving.  The basic idea was that when we save presents for Christmas Day, that becomes the climax of the Christmas season.  No matter how much we talk about Advent and Jesus and the spiritual things of the season, everything is still building towards opening gifts on Christmas morning.  Gifts are good and have their place, but removing them from the end of the season might take away some of their importance.

I liked the idea, but simply couldn't personally justify gifts at Thanksgiving.  After exploring a number of other possibilities, Isaac and I settled on St. Nicholas Day (December 6) for our immediate family's exchange.  It offers the opportunity to talk about the real St. Nicholas and the good things he represents, and encourages this extravagant girl to keep gifts confined to what will fit in a stocking.  (I was not entirely successful this year.)


We're a little worried that Christmas morning will feel empty to us (the adults . . . the littles don't know the difference!) in the future.  This year, of course, with Christmas being on a Sunday, we were our usual Sunday-morning busy and didn't notice a difference.  In coming years, though, I hope to create some special family traditions for Christmas morning in lieu of gift-giving: an elaborate and/or indulgent breakfast, maybe getting these cookie cutters to decorate an edible Nativity scene, maybe something else I haven't thought of yet!  (Any ideas?)
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  1. ASHTONJanuary 4, 2012 at 1:57 AM

    We like to make a birthday cake and sing happy birthday to Jesus. For awhile we always went to hibachi on someone's birthday so we did that for Christmas, too. We try to emphasize it being Jesus' birthday.

    I hope in the future to find somewhere to serve as a family on Christmas day.

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  2. ChristyJanuary 4, 2012 at 12:54 PM

    Isaac (the Stickler) is big on the fact that Jesus was actually born in April (the 17th, according to his research), so I doubt we'll ever do the birthday thing too heavily (even though it's a perfectly logical thing to do, given the Story of the season). :) The dangers of living with a Bible scholar . . .

    That's a good idea, to find somewhere to serve as a family!

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  3. Katey January 27, 2012 at 2:45 PM

    I told Ryan about this post, and we both agreed it's so great to read things from people like you and Isaac who are thoughtful and deliberate about the way you do things. Thanks for the food for thought!

    ReplyDelete
  4. ChristyJanuary 27, 2012 at 3:09 PM

    Thanks, Katey! I wish we were more deliberate about more things, but I suppose one can't do everything at once. Next up for major decision making: what to do for preschool!

    ReplyDelete

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