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!

 

 

 

Happy Birthday Baby Jesus!  Merry Christmas!

 

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from Children of the Church!  I hope that you have a wonderful and blessed Christmas with those who you love.  You are all in my thoughts and prayers this Christmas! 

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the town,
St. Joseph was searching, walking up roads and down;
Our Lady was waiting, so meek and so mild,
While Joseph was seeking a place for the Child;

The children were nestled, each snug in their beds,
The grown-ups wouldn't bother, there's no room they said;
When even the innkeeper sent them away,
Joseph was wondering, where they would stay;
He thought of the caves in the side of the hills,
Lets go there said Mary, it's silent and still;

The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow,
Made pathways of light for their tired feet to go;
And there in a cave, in a cradle of hay,
Our Savior was born on that first Christmas Day!

The Father was watching in heaven above,
He sent for His angels, His couriers of love;
More rapid than eagles God's bright angels came;
Rejoicing and eager as each heard his name;

Come Power, Come Cherubs, Come Virtues, Come Raphael,
Come Thrones and Dominions, come Michael and Gabriel;
Now fly to the Earth, where My poor people live,
Announce the glad tiding My Son comes to give;

The Shepherds were watching their flocks on this night,
And saw in the heavens and unearthly light;
The Angels assured them, they'd nothing to fear,
It's Christmas they said, the Savior is here!

They hastened to find Him, and stood at the door,
Till Mary invited them in to adore;
He was swaddled in bands from His head to His feet,
Never did the Shepherds see a baby so sweet!

He spoke not a word, but the shepherds all knew,
He was telling them secrets and blessing them too;
Then softly they left Him, The Babe in the hay,
And rejoiced with great joy on that first Christmas Day;

Mary heard them exclaim as they walked up the hill,
Glory to God in the Highest, Peace to men of good will!

By: Sister St. Thomas, B.N.D. de N

 
 

The Nativity print that we have hanging in our living room

 

12 Days of Christmas Celebrations

The most exciting thing about Christmas in the Catholic faith (well other than the birth of Jesus of course) is that we really have 12 days to celebrate!  We start the true Christmas celebration on Christmas - December 25th and continue until Epiphany - January 6th.  Here are a few SIMPLE ways that we like to celebrate during these 12 days!  We also leave our Christmas tree and decorations until after the Epiphany as we continue to celebrate!

Christmas:  We try to make sure that the focus of our Christmas day is surrounding the birth of Jesus!  We go to mass as a family and then open our Christmas presents as a family.  We have decided the past few years that we get three Christmas presents for each child to represent the three gifts from the Wisemen.  It helps to keep the amount of presents under control and gives purpose as well.  We celebrate gifts from St Nicholas on his feast day, so the children have already celebrated that part of the Christmas season by the time we get to Christmas Day!

We bake a birthday cake for baby Jesus and sing Happy Birthday!  We also add baby Jesus to our nativity set, because during Advent we display a pregnant Mary figurine.  The children also get to put Baby Jesus in their sacrifice manger filled with hay and sing "Away in a Manger".  The rest of the day we just try to relax and spend quality time together as a family!  See our Christmas Celebration HERE!

Celebrating Baby Jesus's Birthday last year

1.  12 days of Christmas:  Remember all of the lovely ornaments that I have from JesseTreeTreasures that I use during Advent?  We use these ornaments for Our Jesse Tree and also for reflection upon O Antiphons.  Well she also has one for celebrating the 12 days of Christmas!  They are lovely and have a great little reflection with them! 

 

2.  Feast of the Holy Innocents:  We celebrate the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 28th when young male children were murdered in Bethlehem by King Herod according to the Gospel of Matthew.  This day is also our son's birthday, so it's really a celebration day at our house!  We take time this day to pray for the innocent who have been prosecuted in the past and for those who are prosecuted today!

Feast of the Holy Innocents

3.  Feast of the Holy Family:  This feast is celebrated on December 29th and we celebrate Mary, Joseph, and Jesus together as a family.  This is a great day to relax with a fun family activity to show appreciation to our Holy Family!

 

The Holy Family

 

4. Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God:  This feast day is on January 1st and is a Holy Day of Obligation when we celebrate Mary's motherhood of Jesus.  We go to Mass and also say the rosary in prayers of thanksgiving for Mary.  Also, since this feast day is on January 1st, we also use this day to pick our family Saint of the Year!  Together we pick a saint that we will pray to as a family and learn more about.  This past year we had chosen St Luke, the patron saint of physicians as our son Luke had just been born and my husband was completing his medical training!

We have this print in our nursery at our home


5.  St Elizabeth Ann Seton:  We celebrate the feast day of St Elizabeth Ann Seton on January 4th!  Since we began homeschooling with Seton Home Study School, we have really loved learning more about this saint!  We even were able to visit her shrine when my husband and I visited New York City this November!  We will take this day to praise St. Elizabeth Ann Seton for her gifts as a mother, wife and educator! 

 6.  Epiphany:  Ever since I was a little girl this was my favorite Catholic feast day because it is celebrated on January 6th, my birthday (It's kind of crazy that we have two family birthdays already during the 12 days of Christmas)!  It is on the Epiphany that we celebrate the visit of the Magi to Baby Jesus and also Jesus' physical manifestation to the Gentiles as the Son of God. 

There is so much to do to celebrate Epiphany, one of my favorites being the blessing of your home.  There are special prayers to say, and then you take a piece of chalk (you can have your priest bless it) and you write the initials of the three Wise Men (Caspar, Melchoir, Balthasar), connected with Crosses, over the inside of your front door.  You then write the year, breaking up the numbers of the year so they fall on both sides of the initials.  You leave this marking on your door until Pentecost, which this next year is Sunday May 24th.

So for this year you would write 20 C+M+B 15

It is also believed that the King's initials also stand for "Christus mansionem benedicat" ("Christ bless this house").  You can also make a King's Cake, which is a cake baked in a tube pan to look like a crown.  You can also put a little trinket inside and anyone who finds it inside is "King for the Day"!

We also make sure to leave our nativity set up (and all of our Christmas decorations) and take special time to talk about the wisemen's journey to Bethlehem.  We also have a set of Candles from Dayspring with the Nativity, Shepards and Wisemen that we use throughout Advent/Christmas.



Our "Blessing of our Home" Last Year

Ryan with our Three Wiseman Candle

Those are some of the fun ways that we celebrate during the 12 days of Christmas!  What are some of your fun family traditions during this time of the liturgical year?

7QT- Christmas Homeschooling

This weeks 7 Quick Takes are about the fun Homeschool Activities that we have been doing this week to learn about and prepare for Christmas! 

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We celebrated Guadete Sunday and also Bambinelli Sunday this week, blessing the baby Jesus's from our nativities.  We had so much fun reading this story, which is new to us from our Advent Stories and also saying the prayer from the book for our baby Jesus's (Bambinellis)!  We also extended our celebration of St Lucia and drove around looking at Christmas lights as a family that night since we had my husband's work party the previous evening!  It is such a fun family tradition!

 



 

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We have been having so much fun with our Saint Peg Dolls that I made with a swap this fall and that we gave as a gift for our children on the Feast of St Nicholas.  Our middle son loves order in his life and is constantly putting things in lines or sorting by color, size, etc.  This week I walked into our living room to find this, all of the little saints lined up!  I am so impressed with having these in our home for only a little over a week how many saints that our children can recognize.  It is also a great way for them to ask questions about saints that they may not know about.  It has been a great learning experience for all of us, plus they are adorable and easy for the kids to handle! 

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We got the Christmas coloring books with our Pre-Kindergarten curriculum from Seton and we saved them to use them during Advent/Christmas time!  They have great narration along with fun pictures to color.  We also have been having fun with the dot marker coloring sheets from 3 Dinosaurs Nativity Preschool Pack!  We love using all of their fun printables when we are looking for things to add to our homeschooling!

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We have these fun puppets from the nativity story that we made with a kit from Hobby Lobby!  They have been a great and interactive way for the kids to act out and re-tell the nativity story!  Our 3 year old really likes the part when the wise men bring PRESENTS!!  This has provided me with a great way to lead into the discussion of what the true meaning of Christmas is!

 

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Do you remember how I said that we like puzzles?  Well one of our favorites is this fun puzzle of the nativity!  We have had a great time putting it together multiple times this week and talking about the nativity story.

 

 

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One thing that was recommended to me when I spoke of my favorite resources for Homeschooling last month was called Catholic Mosaic.  Not only did I pick up a copy of Catholic Mosaic but I also got Christmas Mosaic and we are LOVING it!  A lot of the books listed in Christmas Mosaic were also books that we already had in our book list for Advent/Christmas or books we could easily get from the library.  It has been such a great resource to open up more discussion and activities with great literature!  It reminds me a lot of a Catholic version of Before Five in a Row, which we used last year for our homeschooling!

 

 

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For a fun craft time activity this week we painted Christmas ornaments!  The boys had SO much fun doing these to help get ready for Christmas!  It's one of those craft activities that makes me glad to have stuff to keep it neat and tidy, but I know it makes lots of fun memories and we all had a great time!

 

Well that is some of what we have been up to this week for some homeschooling fun!  I hope you have had a great week of Advent, preparing for Christmas!

For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain't The Lyceum