Children of The Church: 7QT- Our Christmas

This week's 7 quick takes are in photos and stories of the fun we have had this Christmas! I hope that your family has had a wonderful Christmas as well celebrating the birth of Jesus and the love of family!

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Christmas Around our Home

I love walking around our home in the dark with the only illumination from candles and the Christmas lights. Every where I go I am reminded of different parts of the nativity story and brought closer to the birth of Jesus.

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Beauty in the Silence

Do you remember how I said that I am learning that there is true beauty in the silence? Well, one thing that I have learned to truly appreciate is some quite prayer time in our Little Oratory. Since my husband was working Christmas Eve night I put the boys to bed, turned on my favorite Advent/Christmas music (Marian Grace's : In the Bleak Midwinter) and had some time for prayer. It was the perfect time to do my Advent reading for the day and prepare my mind and heart for Jesus's birth.

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New Traditions

We started a new tradition this year for Christmas morning! After careful deliberation we decided a few years ago that we do not celebrate Santa Clause on Christmas morning (no judgment at all for people who do!!) Our children believe in St Nicholas, and sometimes exchange the name St Nicholas with Santa Clause, but they know that St Nicholas lives in heaven (like other saints) and likes to give children presents like the dowries that he left for the girls. We celebrate St Nicholas's feast day in a BIG way on December 6th with putting out the cookies and milk, writing letters for St Nicholas to bring back to Jesus in heaven and St Nicholas leaving gifts in the children's stockings and some extra treats and gifts.

Because of this we really have been brainstorming of ways to truly focus on Jesus's birthday on Christmas Day. We still exchange gifts as a family on Christmas and each person receives 3 gifts, representing the 3 gifts of the wise men. We also light the Christ Candle in our Advent Wreath, make a birthday cake for Baby Jesus and also place Jesus in our sacrifice manger.

We knew we wanted to go to mass first thing on Christmas morning and didn't want to be fighting the kids wanting to open Christmas presents. We decided that all we were going to put under the tree for Christmas morning was our Baby Jesus in the manger. Then AFTER church we bring out the gifts to exchange. It was truly beautiful to see the lowly Baby Jesus under the tree as the true gift of Christmas.

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Christmas Morning

It worked so perfectly to lay out Baby Jesus in the Manger under the tree. I was not sure what our children's reactions were going to be not seeing presents under the tree on Christmas morning, but they did not even seem to notice. Connor or middle child woke up first and ran downstairs and gasped in excitement! "Mom! LOOK Baby Jesus was born!! Happy Birthday Baby Jesus!!!"

We have loved reading our Christmas stories throughout Advent from our "Book a Day" list and a lot of them talk about how Jesus is the best gift of Christmas. Our oldest son after a while did ask where the presents were, but then said "Mom, I know that Jesus is the BEST gift of Christmas!"

We went to 7:30am mass (my amazing husband had only gotten about 5 hours of sleep after working until midnight), came home and ate a yummy Christmas breakfast, lit the Christ Candle of our Advent wreath, let our youngest son nap and it continued that no one really asked for the presents. It was so relaxing! We eventually got to the presents around 10:45am and the children had a lot of fun with opening them as well. Overall though, I think we all felt like we were able to put Jesus first Christmas morning to wish him a true Happy Birthday!

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Christmas Day Craft and Story time

We have loved making our Advent Saint Ornaments from Catholic Icing all Advent season! We made our Christmas ornament today to add to our Advent tree!

What a fun tradition it was to start reading a book a day during Advent! We loved all of the stories on our book list this year and I'm excited to already be scouting out some new books for next year from Christmas Mosaic! The boys love our read aloud story time each day and we had fun reading our last book Happy Birthday Jesus today!

Reading Happy Birthday Jesus from our Christmas Book List

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Happy Birthday Jesus

Since what we are really celebrating on Christmas Day is Jesus's birthday we love to have a birthday party! We have our Christmas tree up throughout Advent and then on Christmas Day we add Birthday decorations to our home as well! We also have two family birthdays during the 12 days of Christmas, so we keep them close by to continue all of the birthday fun!

We bake a cake for Baby Jesus (this year our cake was a Christmas cake from my mother - in -law!) and we even use our "You are Special Today" Plate that we use for our Birthdays, Baptism Anniversaries and Saint Feast Name Days! We sang "Happy Birthday" to Baby Jesus and had cake after dinner (we had an early dinner before my husband's evening work shift)!

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We Love you Baby Jesus

I asked our children what they wanted to do after Daddy went to work around 4:30pm and our oldest son immediately said "Let's go to the Prayer Garden!" The prayer garden at our parish church is a place I take the children often and we love to sit, say our prayers and just chat about what we are thankful for or worried about in life. I LOVE that it is the first thing he thought about doing on Christmas night! We packed up in the car and headed to our church and spend about 45 minutes in the prayer garden and in the sanctuary just thanking God for sending his Son for us! It was the PERFECT way to end our Christmas Day.

We then came home and switched out the Advent wreath that we had in our front window to the manger scene. We will leave that up for the 12 days of Christmas to remind ourselves and our neighbors of the birth of Christ!