Rediscovering Christmas pt. II

Joel and I have talked quite a bit this holiday season about our traditions and our family. We both want the Christmas season to be filled with lots of wonderful memories for our future kids. One of the most beautiful things I have discovered as I have grown in my faith is that there is a wonderful season called Advent. Now for many of you this is a well-known part of the Church and Christmas, but it has only been a few years since I have even known what this is!

Joel and I have decided to make the Advent season an integral part of the way that we will celebrate.

Combining the wonderful memory of the nativity scene that I grew up with & this beautiful waiting, here is what it will look like in our house in years to come:

These are beautiful Fontanini nativity figures, which I picked specifically because....

There are enough to fill a 25 day Advent calendar (these cute stockings found at Hop Skip Jump). Now usually Advent calendars are filled with candy, a Scripture, etc. Ours will be filled with small 5" figurines.

Each day leading up to the wonderful day of Christmas we will pull out a new person/animal to slowly create our beautiful nativity scene. It will grow every day until....

Jesus comes.

Rediscover Christmas is rediscovering Christ!

Happy Advent friends, lets rejoice in the coming of our dearest friend, the lover of our hearts, the Savior of the world.

Rediscovering Christmas

Growing up, Christmas was always such a special time of year. My mom is an incredible decorator, and I remember her spending hours, days, preparing the house. One of my favorite memories was our nativity scene, which would often take up the whole fireplace (Kenya is hot during Christmas) with a lovely story of Christ's birth. Christmas Eve our wonderful community of friends would come for the yearly hors d' oeuvres party, followed by my dad reading the Christmas story from Luke by candlelight & getting to open one small present. Then off to bed, trying to sleep until Christmas morning. We would sit on the stairs just waiting to hear the call that all was ready....glorious memories.

And now my husband and I are slowly making our own traditions. And, like most things we do, we are carefully asking ourselves why we do what we do & whether or not that is how we want to do them. We don't have any kids yet, but we both want our children to love this time of year and have special memories.

So we are dreaming of some great Christmas traditions to pass down. More to come on those in the days ahead, but what about you? What special Christmas traditions did you have? Are there any you are creating?