Traditions...

I have been thinking about traditions alot lately. As we are starting our family with Audrey, I want to have very special traditions to pass down to her. I want a real family identity that we can pass on to her.

With Thanksgiving just past I really think that we want to pass down to her the idea of opening up our home to family and friends, and new friends to offer thanks together. We want her to see and experience a real time of sharing gratitude together with others and always opening our home. We got to experience this in Boston. How we loved our times of Thanksgiving there. Each year we spent special time with good friends being truly thankful for eachother - for what God was doing in all of our lives, for His gifts, His graces and even mourning together things that we suffered over the year. We pray that that can happen here too.

And with Christmas approaching, I want to think seriously about what we want Christmas to look like for our family. What will our traditions be?

• One thing for sure - I want it to be marked with generosity. I read a passage in 1 Tim. 6:17 - 19 "17 Instruct those who are rich in the present age not to be arrogant or to set their hope on the uncertainty of wealth, but on God, who richly provides us with all things to enjoy. 18 [Instruct them] to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous, willing to share, 19 storing up for themselves a good foundation for the age to come, so that they may take hold of life that is real." I want our Christmas to be about what is real. I want Audrey to learn to be rich in good works, generosity, willingness to share. Hopefully our cookie exchange was a lesson to both of us in that.
  
  
• Another special tradition - we love making our Christmas cards each year and we learned the tradition from a friend to frame one of our picture cards each year and display them at Christmas time. We are going to have a framed Christmas picture card of each year from the year Troy and I married. How fun is that?
  
• A friend of mine commented on my last post about a special tradition that I love! Her daughter keeps all of the cards from this Christmas and her family pulls one out each week at dinnertime to pray for that family. I LOVE that! Maybe we will adopt this tradition. And then at the end of the year, after praying for each card several times I hope, I will put them all in an album to look back at over the years. I love looking at all of your special cards and seeing how your families change over the years.
• Another tradition I have heard of that I would like to adopt maybe next year - the night that you decorate your tree - the family sleeps out under the tree (or at least Daddy and the kids :) How fun for the kids! We love making our day of decorating very special. What a neat addition that would be!
• I would also like to get a nice Christian advent calendar to do each year with the kids and maybe an advent book that you can read with kids. Any suggestions?

Hmm...that seems to be all I have right now, but I sure would like to hear from you. What are some of your favorite Christmas traditions? or some you might have heard of? I want some new fun ideas!