Our Christmas Traditions

Christmas time is a great time to be homeschooling. You can adjust your schedule to allow for the inevitable extra activities that come with the holiday season. Many homeschoolers take the whole month of December off or put aside the regular curriculum to do a Christmas unit study.

I am planing on continuing our regular studies through December 18, though we may have a few days of lighter school time. But we have several traditions that help us to focus on Christ in the Christmas season.

We have an advent calendar that has a large Christmas tree and 24 pockets. Each pocket contains a felt ornament for our wall hanging tree. The ornament is representative in some way of Christ. There are accompanying scripture readings for each day. I made this calendar when my oldest child was a baby and we have completed it every year! It is something that we all look forward to hanging and decorating every year.

Several years ago we memorized the account of Christ’s birth in Luke 2. Each year we use the month of December to re-memorize it. Thankfully, it gets easier every year.

This year we have been picking a new hymn to study each week. For the month of December we will switch to Christmas carols, focusing on memorizing the lesser known stanzas.

Every year we drive through an area park that has a light show. Usually we use it as a kick-off for the season, but this year our church has decided to go, but instead of driving we will be riding in horse drawn wagons. This will be followed by a bonfire and a carol sing.

This is our first year in 4H and our club has a really neat service project called the Cookie Caravan. On one afternoon the club will deliver Christmas cookies to various community service organizations like the police, firefighters, etc. I am looking forward to that and think the kids will enjoy it too.

I am also hosting the ladies of our church for a cookie swap. So definitely on our list of things to do this month is BAKE!

One other church activity is caroling at a nursing home. Our church ministers at a local nursing home. Though we don’t typically go to the services throughout the year, we do like to go to the caroling service. It is such a blessing to meet with the residents and share Christ’s love with them at Christmas.

Another favorite event is the Christmas Eve service at church. That is followed by a family dinner of snack food at our house. We have continued in my husband’s family tradition of using Christmas Eve as a time of reflecting on the past year and setting goals for the New Year. This year we will share it with my in-laws and maybe one of my husband’s sisters and her family.

So even though I’m not doing any "special" homeschool projects for Christmas this year, I think we’ll have plenty of opportunities to celebrate! I haven’t even mentioned the actual Christmas celebrations with family!