Christmas Rocks--Big Ones and Little Ones

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Well the stores have looked that way since October, but here in our home it’s finally looking festive! The holiday season is one that can be absolutely packed with extra things—so many fun activities, parties, traditions, things we feel we HAVE to do in order to give our kids the most magical Christmas ever. I have 100% fallen into that way of thinking before. The reality is though, there are only 31 days in December—fewer if you’re traveling those last weeks—and trying to fit in all the Christmas magic in 3 weeks is a recipe for a stressed out mom and overwhelmed, overly tired kids hyped up on hot chocolate and candy canes. A couple years ago I was challenged at a MOPS meeting to consider the “big rocks” before filling our schedule with things that might be fun but not as important to us. You know the old illustration where you fill a vase with gravel and then ask a kid to fit these big rocks into it? There’s no room. But if you put in the bigger rocks first and pour the gravel in and around them, it all fits somehow. I think there’s a lot of parts of life that work the same way—and I think December is a fantastic month to put this into practice. Every family has the few things that are the big rocks for them, and what they are for me is probably going to be different than what’s most important to your family. But if you take a few minutes now, at the beginning of the holiday season, to name what those things are—maybe to ask your kids if they’re old enough to name the one thing that feels most important to them this month—and then put those on the calendar NOW, you won’t arrive at New Year’s Eve disappointed that you never made it to that one thing everyone wanted to go to. I asked my kids about 2 weeks ago what the most important thing was for them to get to do during this Christmas season, and I was a little surprised by what they said. They both want to go to Deck the Chairs (a great event here in Jax Beach) and other than that everything else they named was stuff we do right here around the house as a family—making our favorite treat Reindeer Noses, decorating a gingerbread house at some point, opening our Christmas storybooks each night, and a list of Christmas movies they want to make sure we watch this month. That’s it. They didn’t ask to go to big parties, drive around for hours to see lights, go to any big festivals or anything else, they just wanted to do our favorite at home activities this month. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of those extra events, we love them too! But hearing what they had to say is most important to them was a great reminder to me that we don’t HAVE to do it all for our kids to feel like they have celebrated the holiday season. There’s some freedom for a stressed out mama there!

Our family has a couple of “big rocks” that I’ll share with you, but there’s no “right” way to “do” the holidays with your family! Our first “biggest” rock that we’ve done for probably 4 years now is our tradition of lighting advent candles on our dinner table each night. We don’t have a real advent wreath, we have a candle holder that happened to have space for 5 tea lights and for years now that’s what we’ve used. As we light one new candle every week we say “We wait and watch for the light of the world” and the boys LOVE the simplicity of this tradition. We don’t do any readings at this point in the day or do any special prayers, we just pause for a moment and light the candles before the chaos of dinner resumes.

Our other biggest rock is our holiday season bedtime routine. We open a Christmas story every night by the light of the tree. I absolutely do not buy new books every years, I just rewrap the same ones year after year and maybe add one new one each year. My first couple years, when I didn’t have enough, I borrowed some from the library and wrapped them (making sure to mark them on the back so I knew to have the kids open those first before they were due!). We all love this tradition, we all have our very favorite stories now and get so excited when those are opened. I do stories about all aspects of Christmas. There are stories about the manger, the animals in the barn, Mary & Joseph, the star appearing to the shepherds, and stories about snowmen, Santa, the Polar Express, and the Gingerbread Man. Jan Brett’s The Mitten is wrapped up and so is Little Blue Truck’s Christmas. (See the bottom of this post for my very favorite Christmas books in case you want to add any to your collection this year!)

After we open our Christmas story we finish our bedtime routine by reading a story from The Jesus Storybook Bible. About 5 years ago I found printable ornaments on Etsy that go along with the stories from this particular kids bible—one image for each chapter from 1-24. I printed them on cardstock years ago and tied a ribbon on them, and they are still in great shape. We read the stories in order, working our way through the Old Testament to the nativity stories and hang an ornament from the story on our tree, so by the end of the month our tree will tell the story of the people or God waiting for the Messiah. If we’ve lit an advent candle at dinner, opened a Christmas book and read our bible story that right there feels like we’ve taken care of our biggest, most important things we do in December.

We do go to Deck the Chairs one evening, and we will probably ride around our neighborhoods to look at lights, but everything else that feels important to us is just spending low key time together. We watch The Star and Elf and Home Alone and the Grinch. We decorate a gingerbread house that I’ll pick up at Target at some point (Pro tip, get the PRE ASSEMBLED ones! Nothing is more frustrating for a preschooler then having to wait for frosting to harden and then have the whole thing collapse because the frosting didn’t work! Speaking from WAY too much personal experience with that!) and we’ll bake reindeer noses (pretzels with a Hershey’s kiss in the center—melt in the oven for a few minutes until the kiss is soft and press an m&m into the middle to make a reindeer’s nose) to give to friends. I send out cards because I actually LOVE doing that, but if that feels stressful to you, then just let yourself off the hook—it might not be a big rock for you and that’s okay!

I think the thing I wish I’d been more encouraged to do 5-6 years ago when I had a toddler and was trying to do ALL the things to make Christmas magical for him was to step back and away from Pinterest and slow way down. As kids get older and can skip naps or push bedtimes later, you can always add in bigger holiday outings/parties/festivals, but in this season, if it feels like too much it probably is. I wish I had realized I don’t have to do everything I see all my friends doing on Instagram for my kids to have a great holiday season. And neither do you. You’re free mama, to celebrate the holidays in huge extravagant ways if you love doing that, and you’re free to say this year is a year you need to just cozy up and spend time as a family watching movies, baking or drinking cocoa in your living room and that is just as fantastic. Have a wonderful holiday season my friends!

Our favorite holiday picture books:

My very very favorite book is The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. This is perfect for kids 5 and up, it is a beautiful story of redemption.

Others we love: Mortimer’s Christmas Manger, The Polar Express, A Night in Santa’s Big Bag, The Legend of the Candy Cane, The Baker’s Dozen, The Elves and the Shoemaker, and The Christmas Tapestry