What a fun Christmas we are wrapping up - for years we have been wanting to do a 12 days of Christmas celebration with the boys. I even made Christmas bags right after Noah's first Christmas. The intention was we would have a Christmas celebration with a family devotion and a gift for each of the kids everyday for 12 days starting on Christmas day and ending on the day before Epiphany (January 5). The very next Christmas (Seth's 1st Christmas) began our season of traveling over the holidays. We left Hawaii and went home to Wisconsin to see our family that year - the next Chad was deployed to Iraq - the next year we were in seminary and Christmas break was spent traveling... Now that Chad has graduated from seminary and we are serving a church where this is not the best time for traveling, we decided it was time to finally try for our 12 days of Christmas celebration...
Christmas Eve we got ready for church and gave gifts to each other (we exchanged names and went to the store together)... Then it was off to church. It was a joyful celebration and we were blessed by the family that we have at Peace!
Christmas morning we began with opening our first present... The boys read a devotion and opened their Christmas coal - attached was a note reminding them that, while we may like to think that we receive gifts based on whether we are naughty or nice, we are sinful and the gifts we receive come because of what Christ did for us. They unwrapped their coal and a box with baby Jesus. They placed the wrappers from the chocolate coal on Jesus and enjoyed the sweetness that was left over!
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| A bag of Coal |
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| Seth opening the baby Jesus present! |
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| Climbing into their bags to find their presents. |
Christmas day we also opened all the gifts from grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. There were lots of games!!!
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| Then we had Christmas lunch and watched a Christmas movie on the new television that Grandma Potts gave us for Christmas! And Played lots of games! |
Each day of Christmas had a devotion with a reading from the Old and New Testaments and a description of the 12 days of Christmas song. When the devotion was over we would say "Dig in" and Seth would say, "but be careful it might be breakable..." Gifts this year included many little Cars from the Disney movie (thanks to Grandma Potts for cleaning out her collection), Baseball gloves (courtesy of a family from our church who found them on a great deal and couldn't pass them up - so they gave them to us for our boys), and lots of Legos.
The 2nd day of Christmas brought snow and that brought lots of sledding over the week!
