I can’t help it – I’m so excited! Reason One

Well December is finally here and although I have been holding back, it’s now time to get into the Christmas grove. You may be thinking, holding back!? It’s only December 4, but you see, Christmas carols have been playing here in the stores since September 1 and we have already have a number of carolers at our gate wishing us an “advance Merry Christmas”. So now it is finally December I’m allowing myself to get excited about the Christmas season.

There are three reasons I’m excited this year, more that normal. The first reason is that I have been trying to be very purposeful about the Christmas traditions that we decide to make as a family. When you move to a new place, not all of your Christmas traditions can be recreated, so I have decided we will make our own.

Tradition one: On Christmas Eve make a snowman. I hear you say – “but you live in the tropics”, that’s why our snowman is made of white chocolate. Here’s the one we made last year.

Tradition two:Spend Christmas day and Boxing day on the beach. This is not a very “traditional” tradition (unless your from Australia), but we have found this is what suits us best. Although we have tried to recreate the perfect christmas day and dinner here, there is always one thing missing – brussel sprouts. Ok not really, I mean family. So instead of trying to recreate what Christmas would be like at home, we decided to do something totally different and the beach fits the bill. The kids are easily entertained and I don’t have to literally sweat over a hot stove. Here are some photos of the last two Christmas’s.

Tradition three: Redo the photo frames we have of the kids. This hangs on our living room wall.

For the past two years, over the Christmas break Mark and I have sat down together one evening and looked over the pictures of the year and picked out our favourite two or three of each child and replaced some of the photos in the frame. This is a great way for us to look back over the year together. We store all the photos from previous years at the back of the frame – in a few years time, I’m sure the kids will enjoy looking at the best of their baby and toddler pictures.

Tradition four: Every year I make a photobook of the highlights of the year.

Here are some of my favourite pages from last years book.

I also try to record some of the the funny things the kids say and do

and this year we are going to add a new page. A thankful page. On the run up to Christmas on our family nights (weekly nights were we do fun stuff as a family) we are going to write down all the things we are thankful for in 2009 e.g. a new nephew, healing from sickness, visits from family….. Hopefully in years to come these will be good reminders to us of God’s faithfulness over many years.

So these are some of our family traditions. We have started one more, but I’ll talk about that in another post as this one is really long! Do you have any different traditions that are meaningful to you? Please share your ideas by leaving a comment.

Reason’s two and three can be found here and here.