subtitle– Christmas-time at our House: part 1
Many families (especially Christian families) find it difficult to balance the celebrations of Christmas-time, wanting to focus on Christ’s birth but having so many influences from Santa and other traditions. Young married couples, celebrating their first Christmases together, also find it difficult to meld traditions from 2 family backgrounds to make their own new family traditions that are meaningful and that work for both of them. How do we truly celebrate the REAL reason for the season, while not leaving out all the fun stuff that we’ve all come to love and enjoy? How do we include things that are appropriate for the season and not completely discount the things that have been meaningful to us in our families growing up?
It is nearly too late to begin this since the season is already officially underway. I’m still going to give it a shot, though! This post is the first in a series (I’m not sure how many there will be in the series yet) about how we celebrate Christmas in our house and why we’ve chosen to do (or not do) the things we do (or don’t do). We’re not experts, but we have been very intentional about what we do around the holidays. I am not saying that these things are suitable for every family, because we’re all different. I am also not saying that the way you do things (if what you do is different from what we’ve chosen to do) is wrong. I love how we celebrate the holidays and I thought I would share about it.
Christmas at our house looks VERY different and we have a whole lot of fun. I guess I could say that we’re almost “anti-Christmas” in terms of what the world thinks about the holiday – Santa and excessive gift giving and that kind of stuff. But we relish the opportunity to teach our kids about Christ’s birth and the magnitude of this miracle.
While we were in seminary, my sweetie and I lived over 2000 miles away from family. We also started our family while we were there. Our little girl would have been 6 months old when she celebrated her first Christmas and we celebrated our 2nd Christmas away from ‘home’. So, we began to think about what we wanted Christmas to look like in our house. We wanted to do something about Santa and down-play the materialism that the season has encouraged. We had ideas about how to do that, which included (already) limiting our Christmas spending and becoming very deliberate about what kinds of ornaments we put on our Christmas tree (more about that later). We were well on our way to establishing our own traditions, and it felt good. So what if we were a little weird? It’s OK to be WEIRD, right?
At this time, through the seminary wives group, I was privileged to meet Martha Zimmerman. Martha was a faculty wife, her family was a ministry family, and she had some great ideas about what to do with Christmas. She wrote a whole book about it, in fact. Celebrating the Christian Year by Martha Zimmerman is the book upon which we based a lot of our new-to-us traditions (or that solidified our ideas) about how to celebrate the holidays.
Martha’s book talks about more than just Christmas, and she has done some fantastic research into all of the holidays we celebrate in the Christian Year (beginning with Advent). She discusses the roots of the celebrations and how we can recapture the true significance of the holidays and make them special for our families. Since we knew Martha personally (if not closely) and she’s such a great lady, it was easy to see that the things she wrote about could REALLY be done, and many had been done in her family. [I believe that the book is actually out of print, but there are copies available on Amazon.]
So, starting with what we had already put together, we added many of Martha’s suggestions to our Christmas festivities and adapted them to fit our family and our convictions. We’ve also added other things that we have found to be important or significant. Now, we celebrate the Christmas season from (U.S.) Thanksgiving through January 6 (Epiphany), and we focus on the important stuff.
In upcoming posts I will talk about the Christmas Tree, gifts, stockings, nativity sets, and the special days and special ways we celebrate throughout the holiday season. I also hope to address some of the challenges we’ve bumped into along the way and some of the mistakes from which we’ve learned. Christmas is my favorite time of the year, and I think that is in large part because of the way we celebrate together as a family. I look forward to sharing with you about how we do that and why it’s so much fun!
click for the next in the series – A Christmas Tree with Purpose (Christmas-time at our House: part 2)
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