For my Five Things today I wanted to share with you my top five favorite Christmas decorations. I would love it if you joined in today and posted your own post about your favorite Christmas decorations!
My house is certainly not impressively or beautifully decorated for
Christmas. It is really an eclectic mix of home-made, hand-me-down,
child-made, and thrift-store-found decorations but I love the feel our
house has when they are all up. Jon and I sure have come a long way from
our first two Christmas’s when our decorations consisted of a
Christmas tree with a cardboard and tin foil star, a garland I sewed
from the material leftover from my bridesmaids dresses, and one box
(containing 6) Christmas tree bulbs!
These Christmas stockings are the decorations I am most proud of.
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| Abe’s still needs his name embroidered on it |
My mom made me and all my siblings similar stockings when we were young and are treasures. I made all these stockings in my mom’s style and I really love them. They all have jingle bells on the end because in our house we do a “stocking march” to put kids to bed on Christmas night. We march around the house shaking our Christmas stockings and singing Christmas carols as we make our way to each child’s room and tuck them into bed. By the time it gets to the oldest child it is just them and mom and dad singing. The kids then leave their stockings at the end of their beds and Santa Claus sneaks into their room and leaves their filled stocking by the end of their bed. The rule is that they can’t turn the light on to look at them until 6:00 AM (Santa needs his rest). This was the tradition my mom’s family had when she was growing up and when she brought it to our family. When I was younger I loved (still do) this tradition because it was unique.
This is a new addition to our Christmas decorations.
We didn’t have a nativity set and so for Jon’s birthday I had the kids make this nativity out of polymer clay for him. They had fun making it, even though Abe wanted to (and did) chew on all the pieces. It was my first time using polymer clay and I didn’t know how long to bake it. When it started to smell like melting plastic I took it out and found that all the bottoms of the pieces were scorched. Luckily all of them have held together and still look good… even if they are black on the bottom!
I think my favorite part is Rose’s sheep and the black widow spider she made (it is the black lump with two legs in the front of the picture). I don’t really know if there were black widows in Bethlehem but I am sure that if there was they would have wanted to come see the baby Jesus too, right?
The orange thing is a “blower” that Asher made to keep baby Jesus warm 🙂
Jon and I bought these penguins as part of our wedding decorations. We put them up every year at Christmas and they remind us of the type of marriage we are striving to create.
They make me happy.
Growing up my family had the tradition of giving each child a white bear on their first Christmas. I don’t really know how this started but pulling out the Christmas bears was always one of my favorite parts of Christmas. Jon and I have carried on this tradition in our family and each of our children has received a white bear on their frist Christmas.
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| Asher’s, Abe’s and Rose’s Christmas bears |
And in keeping with the original family tradition none of my kids bears have real names. Whenever I ask them what their bear’s names are they always make up a new name. It makes me laugh because growing up the only one of us that could remember what name they gave their bear was my little sister. Since they only came out once a year we always forgot what their names were… most of them got new names every Christmas!
And my #1 favorite Christmas decoration is our 2/3rds decorated Christmas Tree.
Someday there will come a day when we won’t have a Christmas tree ornament destroying toddler running around and will be able to decorate the tree all the way to the bottom. But for right now I LOVE it that our tree decorations stop at Abraham arm reach height.
Have a wonderful weekend!
I would love to have you link up to your own posts about your favorite Christmas decorations, or just link up to your own Five Things for Friday posts!
I'm soo excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I bought your book, and it came in the mail today. :):) I got a copy for mom, a copy for my roommate who's getting married in August, and one for me. I've read so much already!
Oh, I love them, Heather! So sweet. And the black widow is totally something my Taylor & Reilly would create for their Nativity. Seriously. 🙂 Thanks for sharing! ♥