A Few New Traditions

One thing that's hard to do when you move a lot is to settle into community traditions. I've done better this year with finding local seasonal activities for our family to enjoy with the help of Butler's Calendar of Events. Last night we went to Light up Night downtown and watched as they lit the tree in Diamond Park, then walked up and down Main Street enjoying the stores' decorations and lights, carolers singing, and soaked up some of the spirit of the upcoming Christmas holiday. It was a beautiful night and we brought Tucker along with us--it'd been a while since we'd taken him anywhere. He had such a great time being loved on by all the kids and grown ups! We definitely need to take him out and about more often.

Earlier in the day, I had dug out an old copy of A Christmas Carol and, like we did reading some of Poe for Halloween, Michael and I started reading Dickens before bedtime last night. The book I found even includes some of his lesser known Christmas classics-The Cricket on the Hearth and The Chimes, and a couple others to keep us reading all through December!

We're also going to start our Jesse Tree Advent Devotional this week. Since my printer decided to go on the fritz, I wasn't able to print out the entire sixty-eight pages (a little much...) But managed to pare it down to a more reasonable twenty pages and a wonderful friend offered to print it for us. For our tree, I plan to draw bare branches on our kitchen's dry erase board then have Michael draw on the ornaments every day. I think he'll get into the art aspect and I know I'll really enjoy seeing his creativity fill in our tree. I'll do my own Advent calendar doodling in my daily planner--yes, I'll post pics as they both fill in!

For our weekly letter/postcard challenge, I did send a letter off to my penpal, Janine, in the UK, then sat down and created a Christmas postcard to send out into the world via Postcrossing. I bought a set of watercolor pencils a couple years ago and never got up the courage to actually try them. I suffer blocks like that-totally psych myself into doing nothing. Well, no more. I'm deciding to be a little braver. It's a very simple design, but I colored it in then painted...it was fun! I have more ideas I want to try and having this little success under my belt definitely encourages me to try my hand at more!

Hopefully we'll break out the decorations soon, though I'm not sure how well all that will do with Tucker the Insatiable. I'm afraid he'll eat everything we put up! We've decided to put our tree in the basement for a couple reasons: I don't plan to heat our back porch like we did last winter, save some on our utilities, and Bill spent a whole day downstairs finally clearing out leftover moving refuse and organizing everything else that couldn't simply be tossed or donated to Goodwill. It's a whole new world down there! We have this huge room, complete with our old TV and an electric fireplace-I think it'll make for a nice, cozy Christmas morning--if we can keep Tucker upstairs until then so he doesn't destroy the tree and all the trimmings! Life has certainly never been boring since he joined our lives!

Wishing you all a very happy and blessed Advent season. Take the time to enjoy some new family traditions and make great memories for years to come!