Christmas Traditions

The older the girls get, the more intentional we are about starting traditions within our family. These are some of our traditions from the Christmas holidays.
We all worked together to set up the tree and decorate the house for Christmas.We did one character from the Christmas story every morning over breakfast. They girls didn't enjoy listening to the story nearly as much as they did trying to figure out who's turn it was to pull the character out and put it on the felt board!
I had Christmas books wrapped under the tree. During the month of December, every night before bed they took turns unwrapping one book and that was our bedtime story. This was probably their favorite thing we did this Christmas.I tried to get the girls involved in all the Christmas presents this year so they made all their own cards for the presents and helped cook Pappa and Gramps and Grammy's presents.
What Christmas would be complete without baking some homemade sugar cookiesAnd then making your own icing to frost them with!And we ended our pre Christmas traditions by dressing up and going to the Christmas Eve service at church. This may have been my favorite night with the girls. They were both fascinated with the reenactment of Christ's birth, but didn't quite understand why we couldn't go see baby Jesus on the stage. In fact, Avery got a little upset at daddy that daddy let baby Jesus go away before Avery got to see Him. They also didn't quite understand why they couldn't participate in communion. "But families share mommy. You're not being very nice" were the words I listened to while attempting to take communion =)

All in all, it was a great month leading up to the birth of our Savior and I hope it impacted the girls at least half as much as it impacted me.