simplifying christmas

I LOVE Christmas! It is one of my absolute favorite times of the year. I love all of the Christmas decorations, all the Christmas music, all the feel good movies (even the Hallmark ones!). I love baking and I love all of the treats I only make at Christmas time. I love getting the perfect gift for someone and I love doing service for others. There are so many opportunities to do good this time of year, but I think there are also so many opportunities to give in to commercialization and to turn the holidays into a time of greed.

I am SO excited to have Nolan around for Christmas this year! Something about having my own "tiny tot" has made the season even more exciting! Scott and I have been talking a lot about trying to make the Christmas season about getting rather than receiving. We don't want to spoil our kids with presents; we want to teach them the true meaning of the season.

So... we've decided on a few things we want to do to minimize the worldliness of the season. We want to start by setting a limit on gifts. We decided that each year our kids will get a stocking and one present from Santa. As parents, we will give them each four gifts: something they want, something they need, something to wear, and something to read. We will probably also to a Christmas Eve family gift box every year that will include pajamas, a Christmas book, maybe a Christmas movie, hot chocolate, and maybe another fun treat. We will probably make these different every year. We feel like this will be PLENTY of gifts since they will also get things from their grandparents and cousins.

We also want to make sure that we do some sort of service project every year. We really want to emphasize how important it is to help others. Scott and his siblings decided last year that instead of getting gifts for each other, they wanted to donate the money they would have spent to a good cause. We ended up buying gifts for a family in my sister in laws ward. I'm not sure what we're going to do this year, but I would really like to help out some of the families in our ward as some sort of service project.

Anyway, I'm really excited about the ideas we've come up with although they will probably change over the years as we adapt to our growing family.