A Warm December

Christmas Season

Our Christmas preparations are well underway for this year.  In homeschool, the boys and I are doing a short unit study on Christmas-around-the-world, looking at traditions in Russia, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Israel and Mexico.  Along with learning the geography and flags, we are reading stories and making something sweet from each country!  Along with our cultural studies we had a special field trip last week which 'kept' us closer to home but actually involved a great deal more travel.  The boys, my mom and I went to hear the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra perform "The Polar Express", it was a delightful and perfect introduction to symphony music!

For our family time together we are doing a formal advent (The Truth is in the Tinsel) which involves reading Scripture and making a small ornament that goes with the text.  It has definitely been a challenge having the ornament-craft ready to go for every night...so far I have only missed 2 but we are still early in the month!

And, of course we also have the decorations for the house, which include the wonderful/exasperating tradition of agreeing on a tree, cutting it down and bringing it home--that's all before you add lights and try to encourage dispersing the ornaments uniformly over the entire tree!  While we walked through the tree farm, Marcus exclaimed with great surprise over every tree stump he saw--pointing out that each one had been cut down.

 Merry Christmas!