What We Do To Celebrate Advent and Christmas

I've seen several other bloggers posting their Advent traditions, and I thought I'd share mine as well.  Kind of.  We don't have a ton of traditions for Advent and Christmas yet.  We're still figuring out what we like and don't like, and what works for our family.

For Advent itself, we do a couple things.  We have an Advent wreath on our dining room table, which we light at dinner time.

And we also have this 12 day Advent calendar, which we use as our nightly devotions leading up to Christmas Day.  Each box has a little cutout inside with the person or thing of the day, and the devotions focus on that.  The boxes turn around to make a nativity scene.

The kids like to take turns with that.  Sometimes we have the chocolate calendars, and the past two years we had the Lego Advent calendars, but this year we didn't end up getting anything extra. We have an ornament that plays either a hymn or a part of the Christmas story for 25 days, but we didn't end up getting that out this year.  Once the kids put their ornaments on the tree, I thought it looked nice, so I didn't bother getting out the rest of the ornaments.

We also have church each Wednesday night, which is still difficult for Elizabeth, because she wants to either crawl around or go to bed, neither of which is an option.  Next year will be a different world, I can already tell.

I've been trying to limit the extra activities, because we end up being really busy in December anyways, but there are a few things we are going to try to make time for.

• Making paper chains to countdown to Christmas.
• Decorating the Christmas tree.
• Decorating flat gingerbread houses.
• Driving around to see the Christmas lights.
• Sending out Christmas cards. 
• Making a fun garland to hang over our school room doorway.
• Make a Lego nativity.
• Adding some fun Christmas worksheets and activities to our school day.  I've been saving things like nativity puppets and word searches and color by numbers for days when we want to still do something, but not necessarily anything too hard.

Will we get to all of these? Maybe.  Maybe not.  If not, there's always next year.  What do you do during the Advent and Christmas season?