What time is it when the calendar strikes December 1? It’s Party Time! At our house we make the entire month of December a celebration of Christmas, and that takes a lot of the “work” out of all those holiday preparations.
When I was homeschooling my ten children, they looked forward to the holidays with huge expectations. Of course, all children love Christmas, but like so many homeschoolers, we had more children than money. We could not afford to attend costly Christmas performances or take family trips. Our holiday celebrations had to be cheap and close to home. As a result, we learned to make every aspect of our Christmas preparations into a series of little parties. By making the events leading up to the big day as much a part of the celebration as Christmas Day itself, we were able to satisfy the desires of those little hearts for a magical Christmas season.
One of the things I did was to check out the television listings for special programming. We did not have cable so were limited to the three networks, but that limited selection provided everything we needed. I noted when A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlotte’s Web, and other special programs would be televised, and I always made it a point to watch those programs with them.
I designated one Saturday as Fudge Making Day. No one was required to join in, but everyone did. We made a huge amount of chocolate and peanut butter fudge which we stored away for Christmas, but everyone had to taste everything and scrape the pans. By the time we finished, they were all full of fudge.
For these occasions I allowed everyone to be as involved as they wished, but sometimes I had to really think about what some of their contributions could be. One year when Victoria was only two years old, she really wanted to help. I put a line of miniature marshmallows, a line of chocolate chips, and a line of pecan pieces on the counter. I then stood her four year old brother on one chair and her on another and told them to eat the various ingredients so that I could make certain that they were good enough to put into the fudge. I told them that they were “quality control” and that if they found any pieces that were not good, they had to let me know right away. Every few minutes I would ask, “Is everything still okay?” They assured me that everything was okay. By the time they had eaten everything that I had put on the counter for them, I had finished making most of the fudge. They felt very important that year because they had made sure that the fudge was “safe to eat.”
Every year we had a gift wrapping party and a separate tree decorating party—we always put up the tree the closest Saturday to December 10. I turned on Christmas music while we worked and provided “treats” in the form of cheap store brand sodas and a big bowl of M&Ms.
Daily Bible reading was always part of our lives, but at Christmas I put aside our regular reading so that the last couple of days before Christmas we would read the entire Christmas story from the Bible. By reading the accounts from all four Gospels, we were able to cover everything that the Bible records concerning Jesus’ birth.
I have known families who are able take lavish trips to celebrate Christmas; they go to ski resorts, or they take cruises, or they rent a house on the beach in Maui. I am certain that they have some wonderful Christmas memories, but I suspect that the most precious component of those memories is the time they spent together at those various vacation spots.
Love and friendship are free. By taking the ordinary things that have to be done to prepare for Christmas and turning them into special traditions, we can make all that “work” the best part of the holiday. We can stop dreading the various tasks that must be performed and start looking forward to a month-long celebration of Jesus’ Birthday that every family member will cherish for a lifetime.
Joyce Swann is a nationally-known author and speaker. Her own story of teaching her ten children from the first grade through master's degrees before their seventeen birthday is told in her book, Looking Backward: My Twenty-Five Years as a Homeschooling Mother. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net or like her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup.
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