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When I was a little girl, once in a while, my mama would read about some project in a magazine and then would try to make it for one of us. She did not sew, wasn’t handy with needles. Yet, I remember as a wee little girl, she hid in a little room at the back of our house for several nights. The end result was the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls in the photo above. They have sat below our Christmas tree for as long as I can remember. And I mainly remember, “My mama must have loved me because she worked so hard on these fun dolls.” Somehow I thought they were the guardians of our tree.
As a little girl, I would turn all the living room lights out and just sit in front of the tree marveling at the sparkle and beauty. My mama played a favorite Christmas album over and over again. How many hours I wiled away, I do not know, but it gave me scope and time be dream and imagine about fairy tales of my own making just from being there.
Truly one of the most wonderful parts of Christmas is that everything is magnified through the eyes of our children. Coming up with ideas of things that would delight them and then continuing those traditions every year brings much joy to all, and it is so wondrous to me now to be able to watch Sarah celebrate with Lilian, Samuel, Lucie, and Elanor in her own home!
A friend asked me to write about the traditions we practiced when our children were little. There are so many that I would have to write pages to adequately describe them all. We did different things at different stages.
However, the goal of Christmas traditions is not to do the most elaborate and difficult things, but to help my children love Jesus, revere Him, enjoy His story, to embed the beauty of Christmas deeply into their hearts. Cheers and Happy Advent, my friends.