Christmas Wrap-Up

Well, we finally put all our Christmas things away today! I tend to be slow in most areas of life and taking down the Christmas decorations is no exception. Although, I like to think of it as just observing the twelve days of Christmas! Yesterday was the twelfth day, so it wasn’t truly time to clean it all up until today. What about you?? Are you a decorations-down-right-after-Christmas kind of person or a fellow observer of the twelve (and if we’re being honest, sometimes fifteen or twenty) days of Christmas? 

As we wrap up this Christmas season, I was thinking back on some of the activities that filled the days. There were a few we did this year that kids really enjoyed – some that we’ve done before and some that were new. These were some of our favorites.

The Jesse Tree

We’ve done this for several years now, and we all always really enjoy it. If you are not familiar with a Jesse Tree, it is a way of decorating a tree with ornaments that symbolize the biblical events leading to Christ’s birth. Not all of the Christmas activities we do explicitly focus on Jesus, so I love this because it is a daily reminder of why we celebrate this season. We read one devotion each day of Advent and hang the corresponding ornament on the tree. 

We used these devotions, but you can find several different ones online. This particular one has ornaments that you can print out and use, but last year the kids and I made some sturdier ones that we can reuse from year to year. We always rotate who gets to put the ornament on the tree because it is quite the big deal to get to hang the ornament.

Christmas Read-Alouds

We love doing read-alouds and did several Christmas-themed books this year. We read “The Family Under the Bridge,” which was a short, easy-read chapter book. To go along with the book we made a Yule log cake because all learning is better with chocolate! (This could also be a fun activity for a nature/science study, and you could just decorate it with things like gummy worms instead of wintery/Christmas-y items.) I used this recipe and substituted cream cheese for the mascarpone cheese and added some cocoa powder to the filling.

We followed that one with “The Christmas Pig” by JK Rowling. The kids really enjoyed that one. (I might’ve even stayed up late one night reading a part that I missed. And maybe a little more. 😜) It was a sweet story that covered some hard topics and had me all teary at the end. We read “A Christmas Carol” after that, which we have read the last couple of Christmases. And then, while not nearly as lengthy, we also read “The Polar Express,” a book I don’t actually recall reading before. We followed it with the movie which I had also not seen. 

Stocking Scavenger Hunt

We don’t do Elf on the Shelf (I lack the commitment for something like that), but every year on Christmas Eve a naughty little elf comes and steals all the kids’ stockings, leaving clues for them to follow to find them. This has become a tradition the kids really look forward to, and they tend to come out on Christmas morning looking more for the ransom letter from the elf than at the presents laid out for them. Some years the clues have been rather elaborate, leading them to locations away from our house, but this year we reined it in a little bit and tried to keep it a little simpler. I guess we overcompensated because the kids ended up accidentally finding the stockings about halfway through the hunt this year. They enjoy finding the clues so much that they went ahead and finished the scavenger hunt anyway though.

There were several other things we enjoyed doing this Christmas, but these were a few favorites. What were some of your favorite Christmas activities??