The Days Before Christmas--Days 1-13

Every December we do an advent calendar of sorts to help us get in the  holiday spirit.  I like to think that the kids enjoy these activities and they will be part of the things they remember about their childhood. 

Day 1--Write letters to Santa
The kids know that Jonathan and I are Santa, but I still wanted them to write a letter to Santa so that I could know what they wanted for Christmas.  I found a cute, simple template on-line. 

 Day 2--Watch the First Presidency Christmas Devotional
What a great start to the season.  I love listening to those men share their testimonies of the Birth of the Savior. 

Day 3--Decorate the Christmas Tree
I tried to talk the kids into not decorating this year, but got out voted.  That's OK, though, because the tree sure is pretty.  After taking this picture I realized how short our tree is (it's hard to see over our heads).  Sometime soon we'll have to get a bigger one. 

 

Day 4--Drink egg nogg
This is the only time of the year that I will buy that drink and I'll drink only 1 glass.  Dyllan can't stand it, but the other 4 loved it.  We drank ours with graham crackers.

Day 5--Watch a Christmas Movie

Every Wednesday we watch a musical.  We've watched a lot of different ones over the past year and a half.  For this month, though, we swapped our musical with a Christmas movie.  Today it was a Veggie Tales one about the origin of St. Nicholas. 

 

Day 6--Write and preform a Christmas play

We just finished reading A Christmas Carol followed by Jacob T. Marley so the kids decided to act out the 3 ghosts visiting Scrooge.  Ephram was Scrooge, Braedi was Marley, Faythe was the Ghost of Christmas Past, Dyllan was the Ghost of Christmas Present and Corbin was the Ghost of Christmas's Yet to Come. 

Day 7--Paint a Christmas Picture

The kids used oil pastels to draw a picture about Christmas then painted over their picture with water colors.

Day 8--Play a Christmas Game

We ran out of time to play the game on this day, but we made sure to fit it in during the next day.  I found a site with a lot of fun Christmas games and we chose 2 to play--pass the ornament and who am I Santa.  We had lots of laughs. 

 

Day 9--Read a story from the Friend

The Friend always has good Christmas stories.  We just received it in the mail the day before so all the stories were new. 

Day 10--Christmas craft
Aunt Alison sent the kids a cute craft to make.  We printed them off, cut and glued and made a little penguin family.  Thanks, Alison!

Day 11--Christmas movie
This time we watched Christmas  Bunny--a cute story about a foster child who finds a new family. 

Day 12--Color a Christmas picture
Some days we needed a short, simple activity and this was one of them.  We took coloring pages with us while we ran errands and helped Grandma and the kids colored as they had time and desire.

Day 13--Paper Christmas ornaments
For this activity we took scraps of wrapping paper, cut them in strips and glued them to a piece of paper.  Then we cut out a circle from our paper and added string to make an ornament.  They turned out cute.