Daddy wants a huge tree. A short tree would look silly in our house as we have 10 foot ceilings. He's said that he would like the angel to touch the ceiling. Hmm...this means we need more decorations for the tree. Our girl loves crafts! So, what better idea than making a craft that can hang on the tree.
Today we are going to paint a plaster ornament.
Today's post won't be about ornaments so much as it is about trees and Advent.
We like to reserve Christmas day for the celebration of Jesus's birthday. This is getting more challenging as our girl gets older. When she was really young we were able to avoid Santa almost completely. Now she is so fascinated by the big guy in red that this year she actually asked for something. Something pretty specific too!
Our Santa day is celebrated on December 5-7 with the celebration of Sinterklaas day. (More to come on that this Friday).
The rest of the month is spent gearing up for Christmas.
In our 8 years of marriage and almost 4 years of parenthood, we've developed our own Christmas traditions. Again, I will write more on those traditions later this month.
When it came time to celebrate Lu's first Christmas we discussed what we would do for Advent. I personnally like the idea of counting down to Jesus' birthday. What I didn't particularly like was feeding a child sugar filled, nutrition-lacking candy or chocolate everyday in order to countdown. So that meant those chocolate advent calendars were out.
So what could we do that didn't involve more sugar? (Trust me Lu gets a fair share of sugar, too much...although we limit the amount, it still happens. After all she is 50% Dutch!)
We looked online for ideas. There are many different suggestions on Pinterest. Some are very cute. We happened to be in a dollar store (which really wasn't a dollar store...) and found an advent pocket chart. The chart had a star that could be moved from pocket to pocket in order to countdown.
Lovely isn't it? I particularly love the image. What better picture for Jesus' birthday countdown than an image of his actual birthday!
We decided that we would add a bit to the pocket chart. While in a Liquidation World, we found a small pack of 21 ornaments. Small enough to fit inside the pockets. We picked up 3 more. Then we found a small artificial tree on clearance. The tree that we originally bought was extremely marked down due to the lights not working on it. Easy fix. New lights and it was good to go.
Everyday leading up to Christmas, Lily gets to put a new ornament on her tree. On the 24th the star goes on, lighting the way to the baby in the manger. She then moves the star to the new empty pocket. She loves doing this and we love that it doesn't involve more sugar.
I'd love to hear about it in the comments section!
Merry Christmas!
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