Traditions and the 12 days of Christmas

I promise this will be my last post about Christmas, for this season. As many of you know I decided to try something different for Christmas this year. I think that traditions are important and a wonderful part of the holidays. It is interesting how certain things become ingrained in your memory because of a tradition. On the other hand you can inadvertently start traditions that you may not want to start. My kids, for example, insist that it is a tradition at our house to stay home from school on your birthday and go shopping with Mom for a present, despite the fact that Mom and Dad have already bought presents. Where this "tradition" came from I'll never know. It is entirely possible that at some point one of the kids stayed home on their birthday for one reason or another. It is also possible that I took somebody shopping on their birthday once, probably because they were given a gift card by a family member. The point is that I had no idea this was a tradition. So be careful what you do on special occasions, a singular event may very well unintentionally become, at least to some, a tradition.

This particular event I decided to try out and see if we wanted to make it a family tradition. I wanted to do something different for Christmas, make it special and also find a way to focus on giving and on the reason for the season. While perusing the Internet I come upon an article about traditions and decided to adapt one of the ideas for my family. Thus was born the 12 days of Christmas at the Andersen home. Starting on the 20th we gave the kids 1 present each day. The 1st day a game, 2nd day art supplies, 3rd homemade gifts (Thanks to Lars for all the time he spent in the workshop making these gifts!), 4th spiritual gifts, Christmas Eve they received PJ's, Christmas day 1 toy. Each day after that the kids took turns giving the gifts they had made/bought for everyone else.

I'm happy to say it was a smashing success! We had so much fun and the kids enjoyed and appreciated each day. As for myself, I loved this so much. It made shopping a breeze, I knew exactly what I was getting and there was no impulse buying throughout the season. The consensus in our family is to make this a permanent tradition for our family. (It is a tossup between this and going to Disneyland every Christmas! :) Seeing as how the 12 days was more within our budget we will probably go with that!)

The question now is what will each day bring next year? Should I stick with the themes this year or change them? We shall see, but I'm happy to say that our whole Christmas was enjoyable, the kids were able to spend one day simply giving and not receiving and overall I'd say this was successful and happy Christmas. Here is to hoping you each had just as enjoyable a Christmas as we did!